Word: understandably
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...that they're uncommunicative, they're not helpful around the house, they fold into themselves and are only comfortable around other men. I think British men are just extreme examples of that. They're really uncommunicative. They really don't want to talk about feelings. They really don't understand when you're having an emotional meltdown. It's one of those things you have to laugh at and make fun of. That's one way to have a relationship with any kind of Brit. If you make fun of them, they can really understand that and then...
...Jane Mayer's extraordinary account of the Bush Administration's torture policy, The Dark Side, which I read simultaneously with American Wife. It is no small astonishment that Sittenfeld's portrait of the President and his circle made Mayer's horror story more plausible for me: suddenly you understand how George W. Bush could abdicate his authority and allow Dick Cheney and his alarming chief of staff, David Addington, to abandon the Geneva Conventions and engage in the most gruesome forms of torture. You can easily see Charlie Blackwell - whose (inaccurate) notion of the efficacy of torture would have been...
Sittenfeld's audacious gamble is that she can make the reader understand why someone as civilized as Alice would fall for this force of nature and stay with him despite grave misgivings about his public persona. And it is Sittenfeld's triumph that we do. Charlie is a puerile, self-absorbed innocent but not unkind. (Alice would never tolerate that.) He is an excellent father and a faithful husband; the pure pleasure of his company overwhelms Alice's need to punish herself for her lethal mistake. He is clever and insightful - his emotional intelligence beggars his intellect - and blithely uninformed...
...first we need to understand that disasters aren't just caused by FEMA and greenhouse gases. Says Tierney: "I don't think that people have an understanding of questions they should be asking - about where they live, about design and construction, about building inspection, fire protection. These just aren't things that are on people's minds...
...Friday he and others conversed with police candidly, trying to be as friendly as possible. "We talked to them like human beings for, like, three hours," he says, rubbing his maced hands. "So that's kind of become my mission; to get my point across and help them understand why I'm here. It's been a really liberating experience...