Word: witness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Brighton Beach, the Eugene of Biloxi Blues knows how little he knows. He is aware enough of the larger world to realize how many perils, including the war, may bar his path to glory. And through the nudging of his wise and principled friend Arnold Epstein (played with ferocious wit by Barry Miller), Eugene begins to grasp that his charm and amiability may mask the moral flaw of self-absorption. When Arnold stingingly accuses Eugene of being "a witness," devoid of passion and commitment, the insight may make an audience reconsider its feelings about the character and also its author...
Underneath that overweight, stuttering, bumbling, scuffed-shoe exterior there may be someone with intelligence, wit, competence and true competitive ability. But who knows unless the exterior reveals the interior? And so an industry has come along dedicated to making men and women look good on the job so they can perhaps rise to top management posts in their companies...
...pleasure in this book lies in the way Barnes circulates among his historical and imaginary characters and in his agile writing strategies. Obviously he has pinched a thing or two from Nabokov, like the brazenness and wit of Pale Fire. Barnes concocts wonderful lists, full of unnerving distinctions: animals, for instance, an enumeration of Flaubert's many parrot references, along with the fact that there are no parrots in Madame Bovary. A chapter contains contrasting chronologies, one of the author's public career and honors, the other of his failures and the early deaths of many of his family...
Most Harvard students who have seen Moore in On Thin lee will agree: the slight, yet highly expressive actor combines wit and dynamism to make such subjects as rice paddies and marshmallow factories funny...
...hour he had his audience doing "relevant anecdotal exercises" and "ad libs for awkward moments." The audience plunged in with happy abandon, though the wit sometimes was about as sharp as a filleting knife left out in the yard for a year...