Word: spokenness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Playing opposite her, Cornelia Ravenel makes a low-key, sensuous and soft-spoken Kate. Enwrapped in fantasy, she lounges on her divan, her eyes half-closed, as her two lovers fight for the territory of her body; then, terrible in her knowledge, she strikes back, her soft voice hissing vindictiveness. It is all remarkably effective...
Nicholson moved past the empty vending machines of what used to be Earl's Snack Shop into the back workroom and found exactly what he had feared: 25 of the bank of 30 telephones were unmanned. A cordial, soft-spoken man from a small town in Kentucky, Nicholson, 28, nonetheless knows how to use a stick when he has to. He jumped all over the local staff. His tongue was blunt, at times crude, and later he ruefully explained why he had acted that way. "It's damn frustrating out here," he said. "There's no spontaneity...
...Family had closed, Kaufman telephoned to ask her to appear at a benefit to be given at Radio City Music Hall during the World War II Bundles for Britain campaign. When Kaufman told her the intended date, she responded icily with one of Kaufman's own best lines, originally spoken by the Ethel Barrymore figure in the play that she had found so offensive. "I'm sorry," she told Kaufman, "but I plan to have laryngitis that...
...City College Psychology Professor Lawrence Plotkin argues that "ETS tests operate to exclude blacks, poor people, Chicanos and other minorities from professional training." Which isn't surprising when, for example, millions of Spanish speaking Americans have their "aptitude" tested in a language that isn't spoken in their homes...
Barrett, a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author of several nonfiction books, is adept at the mechanics of the novel. His dialogue sounds spoken, the scenes pass by smoothly and at just the right clip. Occasionally the prose is too lavish: "The sofas and chairs lie in cool pools of watery shadow like velvet leviathans anesthetized." But such empurplings fade as the book proceeds on its quiet but genuinely moving path. In the end, The End of the Party seems a well-tended, well-annotated photo album, an example of loving nostalgia tempered by wisdom...