Word: taciturn
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...unsuccessfully, to bomb the Iraqi army into oblivion. The Kurdish authorities had closed the road to the front-line village of Khazar, ostensibly for our safety but also perhaps because they had lost the village the night before. Reinforcements swept along the dusty road: we watched as noisy peshmerga, taciturn Special Forces, a top commander, the brother of the ruler of this part of Kurdistan, moved past in a convoy of Land Cruisers, waving regally. The next day we discovered that the Kurdish commander who waved courteously to us was badly injured by a U.S. air strike further along...
...Cheney wasn't entirely in Powell's camp. In fact, in his taciturn, deliberate way, Cheney was starting to go through a shift in his intellectual bearings. "Dick Cheney," says Wolfowitz, "is someone whose view of the need to get rid of Saddam Hussein was transformed by Sept. 11--by the recognition of the danger posed by the connection between terrorists and WMDs and by the growing evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaeda." After Sept. 11, Cheney began running a self-education seminar on Islam and the Middle East, meeting with experts, a Cheney aide says, "to discuss...
...enterprises, bad loans continue to mount, jeopardizing the nation's financial system. Agriculture has also fared poorly under Wen, with farmers' incomes stagnating while China's economy grows at 8% a year. Even when Wen could possibly have mitigated the mistakes of his boss, he chose to keep characteristically taciturn. According to a Chinese professor who discussed with him Zhu's decision to create a state grain monopoly in 1998, Wen "had feelings against the policy but didn't dare speak up." After the government wasted $12 billion supporting its monopoly for two years, Zhu finally authorized Wen to reintroduce...
...Jimmy samples the squid, but Dad refuses the food and instead pulls out a half-finished bottle of Famous Grouse whiskey, plus a glass he says he "nicked" from the Grand Hyatt in Hong Kong. Even though Gazza and his father don't actually talk much?John is as taciturn as Paul is chatty?the son says they're only truly at ease when they're together. The whole family is so tight-knit that Gazza bought five houses all next to each other on a street in the Newcastle suburb of Dunston so that his mother, father, two sisters...
...Mongol history is fascinating. Who knew, for example, that Khan's son supposedly considered massacring China's entire population? But the author's real strength is in sketching the characters he encounters: a Dickens-loving Russian pimp, a shy newlywed, a Mongolian librarian of Chekhovian futility. Far from the taciturn nomads one might expect, Mongolians are voluble talkers ravenous for news: Stewart disappoints his attentive hosts only when he fails to relay sufficiently lurid gossip...