Word: trenchant
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...Trenchant jokes about the Soviet regime have been an underground art form since the early days of Stalin. But those with their wits about them kept their barbs to themselves. Comedian Arkady Raikin went about as far as any comic could when, in the late 1970s, he publicly poked fun at Leonid Brezhnev's bushy eyebrows. A year before Gorbachev came to power a Moscow comedian was banned from television for a year for making fun of an unnamed KGB general. But when Mikhail Zadornov, a Leningrad satirist and television personality, submitted his story to Theater, the editors apparently thought...
Taken together, the new magazines have pushed out the boundaries of traditional travel writing by including information for impulse travelers as well as careful planners and offering, in some cases at least, a critical view of the industry. Traveler, the best new entry, has produced some trenchant investigative pieces on the qualifications of the lordly Michelin guides and the destruction of the Tongass rain forest in Alaska. But in the new sensibility, Traveler included, the spirit of travel porn persists with such seductive stories as "How to Shop Like a Princess," "Ballooning over Newport" and "The Almost-Too-Good Life...
...nuclear weapons and the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or Star Wars. Finally, the trim, 5-ft. 8-in. physicist, who rarely drinks and never smokes, concluded with his vision for a joint U.S.-U.S.S.R. mission to Mars. The performance was vintage Sagdeyev: a mixture of wit, charm and trenchant observation...
...drawn with a compassion that makes the author's moral tickling tolerable. At 36, Wilson already has a formidable literary career. He peoples his little worlds lavishly, and his characters are the creations of an exceptionally alert and abundant mind. The Healing Art (1980) was an early dazzler, trenchant but somewhat raveled. Wise Virgin (1982) was perhaps his best-constructed novel. Now, in Love Unknown, his balance and his bravura have meshed...
There have been several dance autobiographies recently, many of them extolling or punishing George Balanchine along the way, but none is as intelligent or funny or shrewd as this one. Taylor's insights on fellow artists -- Graham, Balanchine, Robert Rauschenberg -- are unusually trenchant and fresh. The book is blessedly free of the cleaned-up quality that such memoirs often have, which inevitably makes the childhood chapters the only interesting, trustworthy ones. Talk about warts and all! For readers who want to hear about pressures and strains on the professional dancer -- the drugs, the drink, the penury -- they are all here...