Word: wit
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Where's the trendiest place to shop these days? Try your closet. To wit: Kelly Thorsen, a school secretary from Lakeland, Fla., needed a nice pair of boots for the holiday season. A new pair would have cost some $200, and a splurge was not an option for the mother of two. "Last year, I might have gone out and started looking around," says Thorsen, 46. "Now we are being a lot more careful with where our dollars are being spent. To go out and purchase a new pair of boots was not in my realm." (See the 25 people...
Delonas, Sean • rapier wit of • still more examples of rapier wit...
...writer has swallowed all of Singapore, from its stately colonial bungalows to its once opium-infested slums, with the verve and wit of the late J.G. Farrell, whose 1978 saga The Singapore Grip remains the great Singapore novel. From its opening passages Farrell signals the vastness of his literary ambition - and then brilliantly brings it off in the ensuing 500-odd pages. "When you staggered outside into the sweltering night," he writes of Singapore, "you would have been able to inhale that incomparable smell of incense, of warm skin, of meat cooking in coconut oil, of money and frangipani...
...Farrell's characters survive in spirit, too. Misfits like Webb still wander into Singapore, and though firms like Blackett's have ceded to local conglomerates, his penchant for order and profit can still be witnessed within today's business élite. With his gentle wit Farrell captures the soul of Singapore: a polyglot Asian port, still partly under the sleepy sway of its British colonial past, and still lurching toward an uncertain future with a furious, irresistible energy...
Upon his return from a brief stint as a correspondent in Iraq (recounted in his previous book, War Reporting for Cowards), British journalist Chris Ayres takes up a job as a Hollywood correspondent for the London Times. There, he witnesses a less violent, but equally disturbing, scene - the rapacious, debt-funded and seemingly insatiable spending habits of upwardly mobile West Coast Americans. Assigned to cover this world, he is compelled to emulate it, purchasing gargantuan televisions, unnecessary beauty treatments, pricey meals, and shady real estate. With dry British wit, he skewers American greed, L.A. life, and his own endless romantic...