Word: taut
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...have an idea of a garden. It is the place where we wish we were, where we are at our best: generous, fertile, humble and at peace. For some the vision may be exquisitely formal, a garden of thought and geometry, traced with tulips and a perfectly taut hedge. For others it is wild and artless, with shaggy trees and hiding places and children splashing in clover. Even if we have never been there, we know what it looks like. Maybe it is the change of season, or something in the social climate, but suddenly it seems as though...
Even as the Iraq war has dragged on, offering no foreseeable end, top Pentagon officials have maintained that the nation's Army is fit enough and big enough to fight it. But last week the military's taut tendons--at the breaking point for better than a year--could be heard painfully snapping from the Pentagon to the Sunni triangle. First came a warning from the head of the Army Reserve that those troops are "rapidly degenerating into a broken force." Then Army officials, speaking privately, conceded that a long-standing policy limiting deployments of National Guard and Army Reserve...
...whose relationship with a returned war photographer (Matthew Macfadyen) the movie charts, the film's biggest surprise is how far it strays from the book. Neither Celia's poem, the lunar landscape of Central Otago, or indeed the war photographer exists in the novel. For lovers of Gee's taut prose (they include New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, who last month honored the author with an Award for Literary Achievement), the real mystery of this crime story might well be: where's the book...
...lost its hold on the national agenda. But behind the hysteria, this is a story about human errors whipped into a new-media news cycle. It is also a familiar tale of journalists wanting ever so badly to fit all the disparate fragments of a story into a fine, taut narrative...
...least remarked upon (and possibly least cared about) consequences of the Sept. 11 attacks is the utter disarray into which they have thrown the American novel. Used to be a literary novel was a taut, emotional family drama set in the Midwest about some sensitive kid coping with a crippling disease. Now books like that read like naive, escapist fantasies. These days it's supermarket thrillers that grapple with pressing geopolitical realities. Tom Clancy's world view has become more plausible and more relevant than Jeffrey Eugenides...