Word: splendid
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...redeeming value of this book really has nothing to do with its shock value or its publishing quality. It's the splendid arrogance of Sex that really sets it apart. By publishing slick photo sex for mass consumption, Madonna, the promoter, makes a bid for America's fantasy life on an unprecedented scale. She has pushed her image as a mass media sex object to its logical extreme. This is porn-shop feminism in full bloom...
...John Adams, the first occupant, had a brief, cold and unhappy time in the new White House, and his dyspeptic ghost seemed to linger there for years. Thomas Jefferson groused about "a splendid misery." Mary Todd Lincoln understandably called the place "that whited sepulchre." Calvin Coolidge once said, "Nobody lives there. They just come and go." And Harry Truman called it "the great white jail" but loved the place for its grace and meaning...
...Presidents in trouble had claimed kinship. Franklin Roosevelt once suggested that Lincoln was a father of the New Deal. This season Truman quotes have been manufactured and mangled, while his prepolitical identity is often shortened to "dirt farmer." There is a suspicion that very few have studied McCullough's splendid text, particularly the first part. Bush admitted he jumped over some of that and went straight to the campaign of 1948. (Young George Bush voted for Dewey that year...
...from Africa's year 1500 to European-sounding formulas about "science and rationality." In 1961, with civil war erupting around him and his own assassination only days away, Patrice Lumumba, the newly independent Congo's first Prime Minister, wrote a letter to his wife in which he conjured a splendid vision: "History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that is taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or in the United Nations . . . Africa will write her own history, and . . . it will be a glorious and dignified history...
...Morris does not force any of these conclusions on the viewer. He believes that one of the great spectacles the movies have to offer is people sitting around and talking. The visual material he employs to illustrate physical theory is deliberately user-friendly. It does not compete with his splendid talking heads. All of Hawking's friends, relatives and colleagues are located in rooms that look real but are in fact stage settings. There is practical reason for this: controlled lighting. But there is a metaphorical reason too. Each setting is a cosmos, familiar looking as the stars at night...