Word: shyness
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...sits quietly at the back of the class, always attentive, always taking meticulous notes. He stares myopically through steel-rimmed glasses and speaks with a halting, stumbling shyness. He has been at the university for years now, studying long nights in his shabby apartment, breaking away only for leafleting or demonstrating. He has become politicized as much by his own loneliness as by history, and any kind of action he may take contains equal parts of activism and self-affirmation. As his sense of isolation increases, so does his political commitment. A subtle, intelligent new movie called The Revolutionary charts...
Despite his steel-and-concrete environment, Commoner was fascinated by nature and became an avid biology student at James Madison High School, where he was put into a corrective-speech class to overcome his shyness. On weekends he prowled Brooklyn's Prospect Park for interesting "goop" to study under the microscope. He put himself through Columbia University with a variety of odd jobs, including researching medieval coinage for an economics teacher. He graduated in 1937 with honors in zoology and a faith in the liberal causes of the time, such as the Scottsboro boys and the Spanish Loyalists. Bright...
...wife Judy, who had never been overseas before, and sometimes seemed understandably ill at ease making small talk with Presidents and Prime Ministers. "It's the 29th, isn't it?" she asked nervously, as she signed the guest book at the presidential palace. Judy's shyness was offset by the easygoing enthusiasm of Apollo 10 Astronaut Eugene Cernan, who accompanied the Agnews on the first week of their tour. With an arm around Judy Agnew, Cernan told Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos: "We feel the moon belongs to everyone." "Ah," beamed Mrs. Marcos, "as in the American...
Pegler's only biographer, former New York Post Reporter Oliver Pilat, suggests that Pegler's tough-guy cynicism was only a professional pose, wholly out of character with his personal feelings of shyness, insecurity and educational inadequacy. He vented his frustrations at the typewriter. Those who knew him best preferred the private Pegler. "Somebody should take the hide off Peg," wrote Fellow Columnist Heywood Broun when Pegler was on top, "because the stuff inside is so much better than the varnished surface." Pegler's professional hide seemed mainly to toughen as he grew older. When it finally...
...Rappaccini's Daughter, from which Rappaccini was adapted, pushes the American black romance to its limits. A young man entering college takes a room opening onto a courtyard garden. One day he sees an extraordinarily beautiful girl walking among the exotic flowers, and approaches her. Despite her extreme shyness and the warnings of a family friend (a professional rival of the brilliant Dr. Rappaccini), Giovanni wins the love of Beatrice Rappaccini. The garden's flowers are, however, poisonous; Beatrice, having grown up in the garden, lives on them. When Giovanni discovers this he gives her an antidote, only to kill...