Word: magician
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...writer who casts a preacher as a fool and a villain had best not be preachy. Kingsolver manages not to be, in part because she is a gifted magician of words--her sleight-of-phrase easily distracting a reader who might be on the point of rebellion. Her novel is both powerful and quite simple. It is also angrier and more direct than her earlier books, Animal Dreams and Pigs in Heaven, in which social issues involving Native Americans remained mostly in the background. The clear intent of The Poisonwood Bible is to offer Nathan Price's patriarchal troublemaking...
Nobody wants to deny Spielberg his success. A scrappy kid who dropped out of film school, he's earned his reputation as a media mogul and magician. But it would be a relief to find him working with material that doesn't come with built-in compassion and grandeur, that instead explores the textures and ironies of everyday life. Saving Private Ryan, though emotionally staggering, leaves no room for discourse--which is why one can walk away feeling simultaneously weepy and cheated...
...magician," says Primakov. "Don't judge this government by its first hundred days." But his first two appointments will frighten foreign investors and worry Western governments. They probably guarantee that the next bailout installment of $4.3 billion from the International Monetary Fund, due this month, will be held up. The U.S. opposes even considering another payment until it sees Primakov's plan to stabilize the Russian economy. "All previous programs are irrelevant," says a White House aide...
Burne-Jones' marital life was blameless except for one intense affair in the 1860s with a young Greek woman named Maria Zambaco, daughter of one of his London patrons. He cast her as a full-blown Medusan charmer, snakes twisting in her hair, and himself as the weakened magician under her spell, in The Beguiling of Merlin, 1873-74--King Arthur's court sorcerer reduced to hollow-eyed impotence by a magic fiercer than his own. "Now isn't that very funny," he wrote to a friend 20 years after finishing it, "as [Zambaco] was born at the foot...
...Rosa couldn't find any objective evidence that it works or that these so-called energy fields even exist. To provide such proof, TT therapists would have to sit down for independent testing--something they haven't been eager to do, even though the magician-turned-debunker James Randi has offered more than $1 million to anyone who can demonstrate the existence of a human energy field. (He's had one taker so far. She failed.) A skeptic might conclude that TT practitioners are afraid to lay their beliefs on the line. But who could turn down an innocent fourth...