Word: taut
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Throughout the Buffalo area and in the cold belt that stretched taut across the Midwest, Americans were digging themselves out and counting their blessings as the Great Winter of '77 relaxed its clutch. In New York, Ohio and New Jersey, plants rumbled back into action and hundreds of thousands of men and women returned to work. Chicago temperatures rose to a comparatively balmy 45°, after shivering below freezing for 43 straight days. In their euphoria, some citizens doffed their overcoats and earmuffs, as though spring were just around the corner...
...bright but whose instinct will take care of him; he's like a chubby rodent that senses when to burrow and when to flee. Alan Stock plays a jittery boy with a cramped intelligence. His Joey is more attuned to emotions than is Murph: the taut nervousness in his shying gait, as though his hip joints were connected to his insteps by elastic bands, seems to stem from his sensitivity to other people's sadness. These actors use each other deftly--dodging, fondling, intercepting and abusing one another's banter and bodies. The only remaining character, the Indian, functions...
...Arab who is mildly sym pathetic to Israel has his car blown apart by terrorists; Israelis confide pro-Palestinian sympathies. The nation, demoralized by the Yom Kippur War, is also torn-and sometimes transfigured-by diversity. Young violinists audition for Isaac Stern ("a death-defying act on four taut strings") while soldiers patrol gardens and political hawks call for takeovers of the West Bank. Israel, Bellow concludes, "is both a garrison state and a cultivated society, both Spartan and Athenian. It tries to do everything, to understand everything, to make provisions for everything. All resources, all faculties are strained. Unremitting...
...except me." She reveals his pain together with her own-which was sharpened by the knowledge that she could not help. Even so, Mrs. Hemingway has also written a decisive chapter in the history of women who do time as artists' handmaidens As usual, her husband had the taut phrase for it: "You hired out to be tough, didn...
Crooked Seams. After writing Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood, like Joan, may have wondered whether she "should have taken it to a psychiatrist instead of a publisher." Fortunately, she did not. For if Atwood's last novel, Surfacing, was her basic black dress of a novel - trim, taut and meticulously crafted - then Lady Oracle is successful motley, a striking work made out of bright patches with all the crooked seams showing...