Word: simplest
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...does Coleman emerge with even the slightest dedication to change in the social sturcture? Does he, with his blunt horse sense, stumble upon even the simplest analysis, that garbagemen should make more than doctors because their trade is more physically taxing? Or does he, with his background in labor economics, volunteer any even slightly liberal measures to redistribute wealth? He does not. He writes...
...simplest level, The Conversation works as a subtle psychological thriller to which Coppola has given a musical construction. The conversation in the park is replayed at intervals throughout the movie-like a theme that gains color and resonance from what has preceded and surrounds it. The conversation begins to crumble Caul's rigorous defenses, and threatens the careful distance that he preserves between his profession and his conscience. Harry's misgivings are refracted in a series of visual metaphors: the confessional, for instance, becomes not only a tentative purging but also another ritual of ruptured privacy, of secrets...
...SIMPLEST EXPLANATION--President Nixon's explanation, to judge by his attacks on those who "downgrade" the United States--is that Vietnam provided a convenient occasion for anti-American feeling. The most obvious weakness in such an explanation is also the most obvious omission in most liberal criticisms of America's role in the war; in criticisms that spoke, for example, of its divisive and disruptive effects on Americans' psyche--the failure to attribute importance to the people who did most of the fighting and endured most of the suffering, the Vietnamese...
This is powerful stuff, dependent on the simplest and most subtle of word choices. These are stories to be read slowly and repeatedly, calmly and with consideration. That they have been written that way is evident in the confidence which glows through almost every sentence. Grace Paley's stories teach patience, and they demand a little bit of it--as a kind of collateral pledge--from the reader who would really learn from them...
Sometimes the biggest problems have the simplest solutions...