Word: witness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...letters are full of MacLeish's articulate and often beautifully phrased observations on everything from political campaign strategies to the function of poetry. What emerges is a cohesive portrait of a powerful and flexible mind, of a man with human weaknesses and blind spots but also considerable generosity, wit, judgment and brilliance...
...they constitute a flowing narrative with only occasional gaps or seams. The story begins as young Archive leaves Glencoe, Illinois, to prep at Hotchkiss; a few letters from MacLeish's parents to the school's headmaster, the only ones in the collection not written by the poet himself, bear witness to their son's homesickness and general unhappiness there. In the letters he wrote at Yale and as a field artillery officer in France in 1918, a somewhat romantic earnestness begins to mingle with Ivy League wit. Though a little grating in tone, these letters provide some striking glimpses...
...With wit and grit, Midwestern communities try to cope...
Elizabeth Dole is given much of the credit for her husband's transformation from a partisan hatchet man to a legislative power. Although he still has the sardonic wit that made him the acid-tongued heavy when he was Gerald Ford's running mate in 1976, his humor has lost its nasty edge. He has mellowed personally and become more moderate politically. His stock soared during the last session when, almost singlehanded, he shepherded through Congress $98.3 billion worth of tax hikes designed to offset the staggering federal deficit...
...Terms calls for a more self-effacing style of acting, though the results are scarcely less virtuosic. Unlike Simon Gray's two major U.S. successes, Butley and Otherwise Engaged, this semicomic, semipoignant drama, set in a bleary backwater of academe, does not focus on a caustic wit who tosses poisoned darts at the world around him. Quartermaine's Terms is Gray's gentlest and most compassionate play. No stiff upper lips need apply. The drama's hero, or non-hero, might be called "Mr. Cellophane," after a song in the musical Chicago. People see right through...