Word: shrewdness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN BOOK OF TOP TEN LISTS (Pocket Books; $8.95). Ever since they were introduced in 1985, Letterman's nightly Top 10 lists have been his show's most reliable laugh getters, a shrewd mix of topical satire and frat-house nuttiness. Recycled in book form, they are just as funny to read. Here again are Jim Bakker's Top 10 Pickup Lines ("Pray here often?"; "Your eyes are the same color as my leisure suit"), Princess Diana's Top 10 Complaints about Prince Charles (always calls Pizza Hut before we've decided on topping we want...
...possibly illegal dealings. Citing Bush's M.B.A. from Tulane University, Denver insiders contend that he had to be aware of his own vulnerability to the go-go bankers and developers with whom he dealt. More significantly, they insist that Bush did not fall innocently into the clutches of the shrewd operators. Bush, they say, was as enthusiastic as Denver's highflyers in arranging their financing of his upstart JNB oil company, which he had the bad timing to start just after the petroboom had peaked...
...that story, Mathers rode their trail, sank his roots into their grasslands and adapted to the big weathers and financial buffetings of the Great Plains. Storms natural and political have raged there forever, and another is blowing this summer. Mathers will survive as he always has, with hard work, shrewd calculation. He and those like him may be the future of this vast and troubled land, which seems to be stumbling back in time toward a recast frontier where grass will be king, some buffalo may actually roam again, and man will be in the minority...
Like those forebears, Saddam is by no means crazy. Rather, he is a man willing to do almost anything to get what he wants -- and he wants to dominate the Middle East much as Nebuchadnezzar once did. "He is an extremely shrewd, cold-blooded, clever thug," says a senior British diplomat who has dealt with him. "Human life means nothing to him." He plays the complex game of Middle East politics by the bareknuckle rules of the region. Says another diplomat: "He does what he thinks is expedient. He is not driven by ideology or whim. He coldly calculates every...
...construction worker who has never earned a college degree, has become the strongest leader of Israel's increasingly numerous and powerful Sephardic (Oriental) Jews. Many Israelis, in fact, suggest that the derision he has encountered reflects resentment of the Sephardim by long-dominant Ashkenazi Jews. He has proved a shrewd infighter in domestic posts, and though he is the first Israeli Foreign Minister who is unable to speak English, he is fluent in Arabic and French...