Word: trenchant
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...Demands of Love. Author Mallet-Joris, 36, counts among her considerable gifts the ability to present believable male characters, an art that is beyond many women writers. She is also a master of the trenchant phrase: a businessman has an "Easter Island head stuck on a penguin body"; a cantankerous father "needs to see his son unhappy in order to love him." She is one of those rare writers who can create worlds that readers instantly accept. Love, and its demands, are what her novel is about. Man's only choice, she says, is to accept the demands...
...spirited eclecticism. He is also a journalist and essayist (The Bit Between My Teeth), an intellectual tourist (Europe Without Baedeker), a sociopolitical historian (To the Finland Station), and a fitfully effective poet, playwright and novelist (Memoirs of Hecate County). Through his weighty lucid sentences rumbles a Johnsonian authority whose trenchant insights are alloyed with grumpy good sense, and whose occasional wrongheadedness can be more interesting than many writers' pedestrian rightness...
...adopting a more revolutionary stance toward the black-white situation, the nationalists have also become trenchant critics of the middle-class Negro leadership. In the first place, the "black bourgeois" who has moved from Watts to Baldwin Hills represents the "respectable" Negro as the white man defines him: he is a man who has adapted, who has forgotten--or pretended to forget--how to talk to his brothers in the ghetto...
...most entertaining. Evidence of that sequins every page in this almost too insistently scintillating biography of the Bonaparte family. David Stacton, a well-known historical novelist (Sir William, People of the Book), employs his flair for research and penchant for the trenchant style to present the Napoleonic drama as an immense and mordant Molieresque comedy in which the Bonapartes personify le bourgeois grotesquely attempting to become a gentilhomme...
...learning that the German army has attacked Poland just after good ole Pokey (Mary-Robin Redd) delivers her second set of twins. Although The Group's McCarthyish airs are trivial as sociology, more dazzling than deep as drama, no sorority party in years has dished out so much trenchant and exhilarating tattle...