Word: trenchant
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Refugees' reports, for instance, are often dismissed as unreliable. But, as even Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.), an authority on Asia and trenchant critic of the Administration, has pointed out, this contempt is ill founded. Refugees ranging from the Jews fleeing Nazi Germany to Cambodians fleeing Pol Pot carried the truth about the regimes they were fleeing, though it was initially dismissed. Solarz writes, "It strains credulity to believe that the refugees escaping "yellow rain" in Asia, alone among the victims of repression, are engaged in a monumental hoax...
...Dorothy Parker here... I found her comic stories brittle, short on substance." And nothing mild is allowed: to go through Robert Benchley's work is "to discover a good many of his sketches astonishingly bland, disarmingly gentle." The 65 pieces that pass Richler's scrutiny are trenchant, acrimonious and sharp. Most of them are also funny. But they are no more mature than the Falstaff put down by Prince Hal: "How ill white hairs become a fool and jester...
...Emperor offers a trenchant portrait of a 1963 conference of African leaders in the Ethiopian capital. During a gargantuan banquet for more than 3,000 guests in the Emperor's palace, Kapuściński ventures outdoors to an area where dishwashers are throwing out leftovers from the banquet tables. A strange sound issues from the far side of the garbage dump. "I noticed that something was moving, shifting, murmuring, squishing, sighing, and smacking its lips . . . In the thick night, a crowd of barefoot beggars stood huddled together . . . I watched the crowd devour the scraps, bones, and fish...
This format gives Percy broad license for commentary, the most trenchant presented in a theological framework. Painters and sculptors, for example, are the Roman Catholics of art, their tools and materials are sacramental objects. Writers are the Protestants, working alone in a bare room with only a pencil, "like God's finger touching Adam...
...There is far too much law for those who can afford it and far too little for those who cannot." That trenchant, if familiar, complaint was voiced last week by Harvard President Derek Bok, in his annual report to the university's board of overseers. During his twelve years in office, Bok has often employed the report as a forum for speaking out on broad social issues (among previous topics: the need for professional education in the field of public sevice, the relationship between the university and government). This year's installment, one of his most challenging...