Word: skillfulness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...longest segment of the book, it painstakingly details a radical braintruster's reactions to the gradual development and stultification of the New Deal, and then America's cautious steps from isolationism to World War II. It is a stunningly realized picture of a brilliant, politically calculating President whose chief skill resides in getting all his various staffers, each in his own way, to serve his turn...
...Beattie develops her characters with enough skill to avoid most of the tedium that can set in when you describe boring lives. The first 100 pages of Chilly Scenes get a little hard to take--the characters lead such bleak lives, moving between depressions, neuroses and unemployment--and some of the stories in Distortions undermine the characters' reality in their tendency towards absurdism. Still, Beattie includes enough gentle humor in her presentation to keep you interested. You come to hope desperately for resolution, for an end to the emptiness and an advent of warmth. Beattie isn't liable to satisfy...
Lysenko moved with Rasputin-like skill. Inviting critics to come forth at an "open" scientific meeting in 1948. he trapped them into confessing their adherence to the old "Mendel-Morgan" genetic heresies and, with Stalin's approval, replaced them with his cronies. As Director of the Genetics Institute of the Academy of Sciences, Lysenko banned all experiments in traditional genetics; even the fruit flies used in this work were destroyed by boiling...
...Vegas roulette wheels, which have two zero spaces, the house benefits by 5.26%. (In Monte Carlo, where the wheels have only one zero, the house margin is 2.7%.) In blackjack in Vegas, the house has a basic advantage of 5.9%, though this can vary depending on the skill of a player. The best casino odds are in craps, where the house is only 1.4% better off than the player. Slot machines vary, keeping 3% to 22% of the coins they swallow...
...unraveled the musical and spiritual mysteries of Brahms' A German Requiem, the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, a double bill of the Mozart Requiem and Bruckner Te Deum and the Verdi Requiem Mass. Each of these is a work of immense proportions requiring time and money as well as skill to prepare. The average orchestra in the U.S. will usually do one such score a year. As the world of music has known for a quarter of a century, there is nothing average about Karajan. For this occasion he brought with him not only the Berlin Philharmonic, but 150 members...