Word: timidity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mano's narrator is Calvin Beecher Pratt, a timid, fat, white Episcopal priest who leaves a cloistered, scholarly life to take over a crumbling empty church in the imagined Harlem of the 1970s. There Pratt becomes inextricably involved with an anti-white Negro organization called the Horn Power Movement and its dynamic but tormented leader, George Horn Smith. Middleweight champion of the world, orator, professed illiterate and economic genius, Smith is a man possessed of a freakish protuberance-an eleven-inch horn jutting from his forehead...
...view, a concession is merely a phase in a continuing struggle." He also has doubts about the notion that as Russia evolves into a more liberal society, it will necessarily be more tractable. "In some respects," he said recently, "it was easier to deal with Stalin than with this timid, mediocre leadership that lets crises develop and has missiles...
...born brawler and natural teller of war stories. Mailer gives us the coordinates of the enemy-the timid, shortsighted publishers who at first shrank from the novel's excoriating, charged treatment of Hollywood life. He tells of his anxieties and the state of his abused liver-which, if the laws of metaphor may be suspended briefly, he has worn as proudly as a Purple Heart. And Mailer never lets the reader forget that he is an important and dedicated writer constantly bent on making his prose as penetrating as his visions...
...Barzun deplores from a set of statistics. Attitudes are his material, and he often trusts his luck to pick out the signs of the times on campus. The footnotes he supplies are more in the nature of anecdotes, while an impressive bibliography refers readers to more factual (and timid) efforts...
...other man, defends the operations. He points to what happened after early, unsuccessful attempts at heart-valve surgery in the 1920s: "Because of a few initial failures, no further surgery inside the heart was done for 20 years. Those years were lost, and the next efforts were relatively timid approaches. I believe it was a mistake to call a halt then...