Word: tyrant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...spawned two curriculum reform proposals that promise a return to the days when high school grads could be counted on to do simple arithmetic and read had signs. But one panacea suffers from dreamy idealism, and the other will work only if America can somehow shake free from the tyrant of its college admissions process...
...Rosten casts Lipshitz as a husband. Steinbrenner is more like an archetypal father. When he is up for the role, he is a perfect family tyrant: overbearing, insufferable, unembarrassable, the kind of man who makes scenes in public and mortifies his children. The Pittsburgh Pirates used to describe themselves as "family." That was sentimentality. The Yankees are more like a grimly real family: sullen and bruised by grievances and quarrelsome and full of parricidal silences. Presiding over the drama is the militaristic alldaddy, Steinbrenner as the Great Santini. He thunders, and acquires a certain force of nature...
...sometimes we harbor a subversive suspicion that it doesn't really matter. Once, we think, we were a people of the book. Now we begin to seem, perhaps irreparably, a people of the tube. The race of literary giants, the tyrant genius founders (Homer, Tolstoi, Flaubert, Joyce, Proust and so-on), will of course be safely stowed away on microfilm:literature freeze-dried, the Great Books kept as curios of the culture, like shrunken heads. But the writing we tend to get now, books milling around aimlessly at the dead end of the post modern (or wherever we technically...
...should have produced a temperamental brat. He peanut-buttered the neighbors' windows. As his endlessly indulgent mother Leah says, "His badness was so original that there weren't even books to tell you what to do." Steven Spielberg's precocious success might have created a pampered tyrant. But as Leah says, and as everyone who knows him agrees, "He doesn't have a blown-upness about...
Beyond that, Podhoretz makes no attempt to class any of the pathetically weak strongmen who took our orders in the South was more than a tyrant. He credits Diem with jailing tens of thousands, assisting local officials, and the "wholesale suppression of political opposition." Life under Thieu, he adds, included "rigged elections" and "those underground 'tiger cages' fit only for wild animals. "It seems reasonably clear why the South Vietnamese of the 1950s were not terrified of choosing undemocratic...