Word: sketches
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...American failure to analyze Marshall's vision goes beyond economic and political miscalculation. How much of the prestige that attaches to the Marshall Plan is really a misunderstanding of its genesis and intent? The Plan itself provided only a broad sketch; among its most important guiding principles was pluralism, a willingness to let the Europeans experiment with both private enterprise and socialism in their recovery efforts. It was the Plan's lack of ideological rigidity that made it so profoundly useful...
...years old, a number eternally associated with Mays, and wears 44 on his back, Aaron's ancient monogram. His hitting stance is as bowed as a bull rider's and, like Mays, he wields his bat low. But he is more coiled and wristy even than Aaron. Davis' thumbnail sketch includes these barely credible entries: supposedly he developed those wrists dribbling basketballs endlessly on the blacktops of direst Los Angeles and was a mere eighth-round draft choice in 1980 because most of the baseball scouts were afraid to venture into the neighborhood. From the sound of it, the place...
...opening moments of Arthur Miller's first great play sketch a leafy backyard world as lazily enticing, and as deceptive, as the small-town dream that unfolds in the 1986 film Blue Velvet. As these neighbors in shirt sleeves slowly survey the morning, meander through a newspaper, savor a cigar, audience members cannot help longing to live in this clapboard paradise. . Until, that is, they find out what it is really like. The corruption beneath the surface in Blue Velvet is trendily psychosexual. In All My Sons it is economic and political. At the root of the play's evil...
...that Gordon has devoted to it in each book, not because domesticity is so panoramic but rather so long, such a matter of daily minutiae, small increments of knowledge, feelings and guilt that gather from infancy to death. This process yields itself up grudgingly to the summary or the sketch; Gordon's formidable reputation has not been won through short stories...
...audience doesn't come along for the ride, physically or emotionally. After opening moments of real wonder, the dramatic tension depends increasingly on what tricks the set can do next: opening the floor to send up a concealed bedroom or judging stand; filling the midnight sky with stars that sketch a celestial madonna in a surge of unexamined theological kitsch. Against this whizbangery, the actors make scant impression, although Robert Torti is an oily villain and Greg Mowry a winsome underdog. Andrew Lloyd Webber's pastiche of American pop offers histrionic passages but no memorable tunes. Worse, the races...