Word: timidation
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LIFE OF BRIAN does not do the job on the gospels that Holy Grail did on the Arthurian legends. The scope is more timid, the technique less audacious. We had a right to expect better, funnier, or at least wilder. The more slavishly Monty Python tries to follow conventions--the more they tailor their films to play in Peoria--the less anyone will laugh at them. The film remains only a funny shadow of what might have been--like Jesus Christ beating a dead parrot...
...passion that has increasingly dominated Hawkes' recent books (The Blood Oranges, Travesty) is sex; The Passion Artist, his eighth novel, dwells still more obsessively on this subject. The title begins in irony. Konrad Vost is neither passionate nor an artist but rather an epitome of timid rationality. Hawkes stresses his hero's stylized anonymity, his "small perfectly round gold-rimmed spectacles, his two ill-fitting suits of black serge, his black turtleneck shirts, his pointed shoes that were always worn at the heels and covered with a faint dusting of powdered concrete from the walls of unfinished buildings...
Whoever wrote the title "Baltimore's Soft-Shelled Crab" knows more about baseball than about crabs. The softshelled crab, having just shed his protective shell, is the most vulnerable and timid crustacean, and usually hides in the sea grasses and shallows. Not a very apt comparison to fiery and aggressive Earl Weaver...
Carter's approval rating spurted eleven points in a New York Times-CBS poll, to 37%?the first upturn since a survey last March. Even critics who faulted his energy program as too timid regarded it as a much needed beginning (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS). Said Democratic National Chairman John White, who thought he saw the makings of a re-election winner in 1980: "I took down my 'for sale' sign this morning...
...will always be a shadowy web surrounding the real Charles Darwin," writes Eiseley. But as anyone who reads his book will realize, Eiseley has come closer than anyone else to solving that mystery and breaking that web. In graceful, occasionally poetic prose, he shows how Darwin, who was initially timid about advancing his theory, was almost beaten into print by Alfred Russel Wallace, a younger, all but unknown researcher. After discussion, the two agreed to announce their theory simultaneously. Eiseley also outlines Darwin's relationship with Charles Lyell, whose research established modern geology and laid the foundation...