Word: spoiled
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...York Times column, but this is only her second novel -- she has given her story a cumbersome plot frame, involving a grand jury investigation of a mercy killing and a melodramatic double misunderstanding underlying an estrangement between Ellen and her father. This elaboration clutters the novel but does not spoil it. Nor does the sense that beyond its last page, Ellen still has a living parent whom she understands only as a collection of flawed character traits...
...educate, train, break and spoil children in order that, as adults, they be able to protect and carry their cargoes in machineries they revere and enjoy educated adulthood is a childliness that is sure of itself; a child irreverent of himself is in Heaven...
...Bruck amply demonstrates, Ross's charm made him a natural for Hollywood, where everyone is a vortex of ego and where success belongs not to those who count the beans but to those who extravagantly spoil the stars. If Barbra Streisand wanted a painting, why not buy it for her? If Dustin Hoffman was vacationing in Europe, why not provide him with a yacht? If Steven Spielberg was looking for a home in the Hamptons, why not arrange the sale for him? "It's about people, really -- realizing what they want," Ross once told Bruck...
...between the accomplished and the envious, each side etched in acid. Bogosian is politically incorrect enough to play an unappetizing street black, arrogant enough to enact an egomaniacal fan and complex enough to risk a jolting tirade against "starving Africans" who, by their unsettling omnipresence on the evening news, "spoil everything." This rant is at once a wail over injustice and a plea for the surcease of not caring -- and it makes audiences careen between those poles of feeling...
...decade is now an open expression of loathing for the homeless. Once romanticized as impoverished casualties of an uncaring society, America's homeless -- who number anywhere from 600,000 to 3 million, depending on whose count you believe -- are now more likely to be demonized as pathological predators who spoil neighborhoods and threaten the commonweal...