Word: sleight
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Gardner saves his liveliest derision for gullible scientists and science writers -particularly those who lauded Israeli Magician Uri Geller and his "unearthly ability" to bend spoons with the power of his mind. In a dazzling chapter, Gardner, an amateur prestidigitator, demonstrates a dozen methods for deceiving the credulous, including sleight of hand, palmed magnets and misdirection. Yet even these instructions are offered more in fun than in malice. For early on, the skeptic's skeptic acknowledges that the most obvious evidence of fraud will not budge the True Believer. Instead, Gardner writes for those who agree with the 1920s...
...this is sketched lightly and crisply. But when the leader of the association appropriates the manuscript of Fleur's just completed novel in order to use its plot as a blueprint for manipulating the destinies of his hapless sect, Spark performs her characteristic sleight of hand. Her brisk little comedy turns out to hinge on mysteries of good and evil, reality and imagination. The feat may be done no better here than in half a dozen of her earlier novels, but it is quite enough to bear out Fleur's assertion that "everything happens to an artist: time...
...this cinematographic sleight of hand would begin to irritate as hyperactive, empty artifice if it weren't for Rush's high-speed approach. The movie hurtles along with a careless, rowdy exuberance for life and the fun of movies. Rush keeps the show moving busily forward, accompanied by a giddy, carnival-like ragtime score; we don't have time to puzzle the enigmas that teem in such overabundance, but at the same time we never have time to pin down the petty annoyances. Rush's eclectic style can careen between screwball frolic and murky psychodrama with the naive self-assurance...
...Bourne Identity is the most absorbing of Ludlum's nine novels to date. His characters are complex and credible, his sleight of plot as cunning as any terrorist conspiracy. And his minutiae, from the rituals of Swiss banking to the workings of a damaged brain, are always absorbing. It is a Bourne from which no traveler returns unsatisfied...
...Congressional budget conferees. Several job programs are due to be reduced or dropped. School lunches and health care for children will likely be cut back. Energy and food aid for the poor will suffer. Carter is presenting large savings in federal aid to states and cities with typical sleight of hand. He intends to eliminate the states' $1.7 billion portion of general revenue-sharing, about half of which goes to education. Since Illinois, New York and some other states pass their share on to localities, the administration said Monday it would seek several hundred million dollars in compensation for cities...