Word: trenchant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this is something of a triumph for someone who, just two decades ago, viewed composition from the other side of the musical fence. As a critic for the New Statesman and the Spectator, Nyman was a trenchant observer of the avant-garde (in 1968 he coined the term minimal music to describe the emerging Minimalist movement) and in 1974 brilliantly surveyed the field in his book...
...trenchant polemic that appears in the summer issue of the leftist quarterly Dissent (est. circ. 10,000), Genovese argues that many American radicals were, in effect, accomplices to mass murder. Many U.S. advocates of a Viet Cong victory in Vietnam, for example, have never accepted that what they considered a radical egalitarian democracy was in fact a cruel totalitarian dictatorship. Until the left is willing to re-examine its ideological premises and admit its past mistakes, argues Genovese, it will have no moral credibility to attack such ongoing societal ills as racism and sexism. "The left will have to clean...
...white critics. In the '60s, when the civil rights sing-along gave way to Black Power shock therapy, Ellison found himself overshadowed by more urgent novelists, such as Richard Wright (Native Son), who played Malcolm X to Ellison's Martin Luther King Jr. Ellison compiled two volumes of trenchant essays but never finished his second novel, on which he worked for four decades. Joe Fox, his editor at Random House, says he was told neither the book's subject nor its title, only that it was "virtually finished." Fanny Ellison, Ralph's wife of 47 years, may know how close...
There he mesmerized staff members with his trenchant insights and vast breadth of knowledge on subjects varying from Middle East-peace diplomacy to Warren Christopher's neckwear to the dating habits of celebrity twentysomethings -- knowledge enriched by a prodigious reading list that ranges from Commentary to the edgy, grunge-feminist teen magazine Sassy...
...Looking in the Abyss is a trenchant analysis of the postmodern condition and its threat to liberalism and the liberal imagination. The subtitle of Himmelfarb's short book is 'Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society," and she means it. By arguing for the restoration of partial truths and solid standards, Himmelfarb's book is a Modern's response to the postmodern condition. Since Himmelfarb is now a professor emeritus and a historian of nineteenth-century England, one might be tempted to discount her description of the current impoverished state of the humanities. This would be a grave mistake...