Word: sleight
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Citizen Kane's" storytelling and performances are enhanced by Gregg Toland's masterful photography. Each moment is a sleight of light. As Kane reads his publishing "Declaration of Principles" in a moment of giddy righteousness, Toland manages to keep Kane perpetually in an opaque shadow while fully lighting the other actors in the scene; even when one moves to Kane's side, they remain as day and night to each other, foreshadowing the depths to which Kane will soon sink...
...literary subversion. It should not draw a Fundamentalist fatwa, though beef lobbyists and overweight- pride groups may grumble about the ceaseless bashing of carnivores and the amply proportioned. Theroux's main dodge is to see American puritanism in a frankly physical rather than spiritual light. Readers may take this sleight to heart or turn it into a belly laugh. Either way, the sorcerer and his apprentice encounter a nation with more than its share of knaves and hypocrites, including the Reverend Huber, a stock evangelist huckster, and Mr. Phyllis, cooing host of a TV kiddie show who is a child...
Most important, however, is the question: Will all the bureaucratic sleight-of-hand which has characterized Epps' tenure as Race Czar amount to substantial improvements in campus race relations...
Films like Blade Runner handle atmospherics of this kind easily. It takes a gifted sleight-of-mind artist to work such phantasmagorical effects in a novel without fuddling or exasperating the reader. Erickson manages the trick expertly. But why the priestly Gestapo of "Church Central" in this alternate America? Because Jefferson was an anticlerical deist for whom a theocratic nation would have been a shaming defeat? Maybe, but trying to decode word-for- word meaning here won't illuminate much. Aeonopolis, the author tells us, is almost impossible to leave: thus a waking nightmare of reason paralyzed, of civility blood...
...ranks of the personal-computer industry has kept rivals wondering for some time how the manufacturer has managed to sustain its miraculous climb. Then a Wall Street analyst claimed he had the answer: the PC maker's ascent had less to do with miracles than with some sleight-of-hand accounting. In a blistering report to investors, David Korus of Kidder, Peabody charged that Dell accounted improperly for foreign- currency trades and suggested that currency speculation may have been used to inflate the company's profits. The report touched off a wave of nervous selling in Dell stock. It also...