Word: brilliant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...their own time here, and it certainly wasn't Animal House (surprise, surprise). More often than not, it was a bunch of people trying just a little bit too hard--to find the party, to have fun at the party, to "participate" in section, to enjoy the apparently brilliant lectures, to feel like we had the complete college life of which we and all our friends from home had boasted at Thanksgiving break...
...Florio for a series of tax increases that had cost Florio his popularity. "It was a peculiar political price for Bradley to pay," says Torricelli, "because loyalty to local leaders was not his reputation. He didn't understand the sensitivity to these taxes, and it almost ended a brilliant career...
Morris is also a brilliant writer--of both fact and fiction. His stylishness is so dazzling that the reader may want to forgive the manipulation he has employed. Again, this re-creates the experience of being around Reagan, who was so deeply likeable as a human being that even the most querulous reporter could be charmed into protecting him from his own vacuousness...
...Gorbachev in Iceland is so vivid as to make it seem Morris sat with the two leaders. In fact, Morris admits he was not there; he went to Iceland later and, relying on interviews, "enjoyed the scribe's traditional advantage of being able to recollect emotions in tranquility." Morris' brilliant portrait of Teddy Roosevelt's rise to the presidency was of course built from research embellished by his imagination...
...position in the ecological web. Thus Purdy conceives of understanding human interpersonal responsibility as "moral ecology," individual responsibility to the public sphere as "social ecology," and environmental responsibility as, well, "ecology." Not, perhaps, the neatest of aphoristic parallelisms in an American environmentalist tradition that has been marked by the brilliant aphoristic prose of its writers: but Purdy, despite his occasional lapses in tone, is an heir to the aphoristic tradition of the environmentalists, and to their conviction that sincere beliefs must root themselves in the solid realities of the physical environment. In Purdy's case, this conviction manifests itself...