Word: slapdash
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Wilde once remarked that he had given his genius to his life but only his talent to his art. The same might be said of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, only his life turned out to be a sad and sordid affair and his art was often no more than slapdash. As Patricia Morrisroe makes clear in her smart and readable biography Mapplethorpe (Random House; 461 pages; $27.50), the photographer's brief life-like his most notorious images-was not a pretty picture...
...well short of present needs. Only 3% of all households in Hyogo prefecture, which includes Kobe, were covered by earthquake insurance. Even people who can afford to build a new home are likely to be stymied at first by a moratorium on postquake construction, a policy intended to avert slapdash projects and allow time for possible new building-code and zoning strictures. In Kobe's case, officials were thinking about extending the normal two-month delay to as long as half a year...
...chiefs close to Yeltsin, beginning with Defense Minister Pavel Grachev, was foolishly optimistic. In the early stages, Grachev, an arrogant airborne commander, boasted that a regiment of paratroops could clean up Chechnya in two hours. Perhaps believing his own sloganeering, he ordered the army into action with only a slapdash plan and hastily assembled forces. According to some reports, no experienced general would take command of the operation...
...sublime to the ridiculous. But Friel's play follows no such forced structure. The tragedy and the comedy are both equally present and equally real from the beginning. Indeed, what is disturbing about Dancing at Lughnasa is not the depressing tale of the Mundys' decline; rather it is the slapdash casserole of elation and despair that makes up their everday lives...
...appeared grim and jittery through a 45-minute hearing that ended with her release on $250 bail. Then she fled home to relatives she had not seen since June 4. By the consensus of literary critics, Nasrin, an outspoken feminist and atheist, is no Salman Rushdie. Her rather slapdash stories have gained notice mainly as screeds against the ill treatment of women. What she shares with the author of The Satanic Verses, a novel that earned an Iranian death warrant against Rushdie 5 1/2 years ago, is the misfortune of becoming a lightning rod for the passions of Islamic zealots...