Word: wasps
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Jews were a rarity at St. Paul's when Robert A.M. Stern was growing up in the 1950s, but today Stern's son is an alumnus of the Wasp citadel in Concord, N.H., and Stern has designed its fine new library. Such happy assimilation: the $9 million structure, which fits into and improves a campus blessed with distinguished buildings, is among Stern's best work. It is Richardsonian (the arches, the churchlike massing) but not slavishly old-fashioned, and the jaunty bits (the eyebrow dormers and the tower) mitigate any neo-Victorian lugubriousness...
Jews were a rarity at St. Paul's when Robert A.M. Stern was growing up in the 1950s, but today Stern's son is an alumnus of the Wasp citadel in Concord, N.H., and Stern has designed its fine new library. Such happy assimilation: the $9 million structure, which fits into and improves a campus blessed with distinguished buildings, is among Stern's best work. It is Richardsonian (the arches, the churchlike massing) but not slavishly old-fashioned, and the jaunty bits (the eyebrow dormers and the tower) mitigate any neo-Victorian lugubriousness...
...Gurney has moved from lacerating the Wasp world he came from (The Dining Room, The Middle Ages) to exploring his own guilts in this pair of pieces about the disquiets and discontents of his generation. The Old Boy laments unthinking bigotry toward homosexuals. The Snow Ball yearns for bygone male authority and apparent female contentment with...
...Lemme tell you the twist. We call the show Princesses. One of the women is a Jewish-American princess. The second is a wholesome, Middle American sweetheart -- sort of a Wasp princess...
Marlon Brando's emergence in the early '50s registered a drastic change in the cultural weather. The masculine ideal reflected in the Hollywood mirror had been basically suave and gentlemanly. Brando, who grew up middle class, Midwestern and Wasp, radiated pure working-class alienation -- an inarticulate promise of danger, sex and social abrasion. Which is why, as TIME film critic Richard Schickel tells us in BRANDO: A LIFE IN OUR TIMES (Atheneum; $21.95), he was a mythic presence for all the young urban professionals of the '50s. Rude but sensitive, rough but anguished, Brando was their version of pastoral...