Word: snake-oil
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...consult half a dozen specialists and get half a dozen conflicting opinions. "Well, of course," Dr. Toby Brown, a Manassas, Va., radiologist says impatiently, "it's not as if medicine is a science." Hence the appeal of alternative medicine: aromatherapy, homeopathy, ginkgo biloba. Proponents may be crusading scientists or snake-oil salesmen, but either way, their pitch falls on eager ears: each year Americans spend some $27 billion on so-called complementary medicine. "One lesson of the alternative health-care movement," McCall warns, "is that the public is not going to wait for doctors to get it together...
...teetotaler's resolve and a revivalist's mission--to get them to cast off their phony dreams. In this career-making role (it helped make Jason Robards Jr. a star), Kevin Spacey gives the performance of his life. Prowling the stage in a half-crouch, his voice oozing with snake-oil self-confidence, using silences as cagily as the torrent of words, he is funny, charismatic and ultimately shattering...
...crafting the first major multinational corporation, Standard Oil, Rockefeller (1839-1937) provided a sneak preview of the 20th century. At his zenith, he refined, distributed and marketed nearly 90% of America's oil. The unlikely offspring of a raffish snake-oil salesman and a strict Baptist mother, Rockefeller grew up in several rustic hamlets in upstate New York and Ohio. He began his career as an assistant bookkeeper in a Cleveland, Ohio, commodity-brokerage house in 1855 and invested in his first refinery during the Civil...
...most memorable character: Rockefeller's father, William Avery Rockefeller, a backwoods mountebank and snake-oil pitchman whose history John D. tried to suppress. "Big Bill" Rockefeller, crack shot and con artist, claimed to be a medical doctor and, in the gullible towns of upstate New York and farther west, promised to cure any cancer for $25. Eventually, "Doc" Rockefeller (who made a habit of impregnating the servant girl at home) became a bigamist and started a separate family as "Doctor Levingston"--the name that appears on his tombstone. All his life, Big Bill loved money, and when...
Americans elected a clever snake-oil salesman who promised dreams but delivered a nightmare. Clinton should leave Washington and sail into the sunset on a ship like the Titanic. FRANK R. GAMMARDELLA Fort Myers...