Word: witting
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...Fastest Wit. The author is Hungarian-born Shabtai Teveth, 45, a leading Israeli journalist and writer (The Tanks of Tammuz), who had nine lengthy interviews with Dayan. Teveth portrays an earthy, sometimes unpredictable man -and the fastest wit in the Middle East. Stopped on one occasion by a military policeman for driving 75 m.p.h. when the military speed limit was 44 m.p.h., Dayan said with a wry smile: "I have only one eye. What do you want me to watch-the speedometer or the road...
When Eleanor was ten, Elliott died -literally from falling down drunk. The little girl went to live with her maternal grandmother Hall, who still had five unruly offspring at home in Oak Terrace, her Dutchess County mansion, and was none too quick of wit. There, too, liquor flowed as surely as the water in the Hudson near by. Eleanor's Uncle Vallie, only 25, was a mean, unpredictable drunk who, among other things, took potshots at people walking on the grounds. Unsteady of aim, he always missed, but such pastimes made daily life harrowing. Eleanor befriended the laundress...
This triangular menage was apparently just fine with the cool, emotionally evasive Franklin. But why didn't Eleanor, who hated it, have the matter out with both of them? For one thing, she had no confidence in her femininity. Franklin loved gaiety, wit and late-night revels. Eleanor was serious, humorless and terrified of alcohol. As his political career progressed, her duties multiplied. She entertained thousands. What with homes in Hyde Park, Campobello, New York City and wherever Franklin was working, a menage the size of a small army had to be moved several times a year...
...gets into strange cabbage patches but is always chastened and led back home. Yet Redux is superior to recent novels that trudge after social significance like recruits in new boots. Updike, after all, owns a rare verbal genius, a gifted intelligence and a sense of tragedy made bearable by wit. How the truth about Janice's well-known affair finally gets on the kitchen table is a tidy masterpiece...
...Senator's brother, William F. Buckley Jr., mandarin editor of the National Review, delivered an extraordinary speech in Manhattan that combined eloquence and caustic wit with touches of Chinese opera. Peking, he asserted, "struggles in its endless ordeal against human nature," and executed between 10 million and 50 million people "in the course of giving flesh to the thoughts of Mao Tse-tung." Taiwan, on the other hand, "is the West Berlin of China." The Chinese on Taiwan have a special mission, said Buckley, because "in the years and decades to come, their separated brothers on the mainland will look...