Word: backgrounders
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...York's early-20th century German-Jewish elite, it focuses on Conrad Arnheim, a lazy, boorish lout who marries first for business and then for ego. The cover sums up the theme pretty accurately: a married couple, screaming at each other, with fists clenched, stand against a background of a stiff, older-generation, family portrait...
...undoubtedly a loner; if he lives with someone, there's almost certainly a place in the house--a basement, maybe, or a garage--that would be off-limits to anyone else. He's got some sort of scientific background and may make his living working in a lab. He doesn't like confrontation, but he's seething with repressed anger. And starting Sept. 11, he became intensely preoccupied--but seemingly not, strangely enough, with the events that gripped the rest of the nation...
Peerless at setting scenes, Morris is not nearly as interested in laying out the issues that Teddy subjected to his rough-and-tumble handling. Morris is surprisingly stingy with background. The General Post Office controversy, the Cuban reciprocity treaty: What things of consequence were at risk there? Don't ask Morris. He's good with the sizzle, not so good with the stakes. When he tells the story of Roosevelt's intervention in the Pennsylvania coal miners' strike of 1902, he deftly sketches in the players--George F. Baer, the imperious representative of the mine owners; John Mitchell, the charismatic...
...Senate, under Democratic leadership, unanimously took the opposing view: Only by federalizing security workers and performing high-level background checks, their argument goes, can the government implement truly universal safety standards. Otherwise, you end up with the same private firms employing the same incompetent people who?ve allowed past lapses...
...season. The response to that is obvious, but nonetheless crucial. “We’re not going to cast six straight, white frat boys from Iowa. One of those might work in a certain situtation, but not as a rule. This person has this thing in their background...this person has that...these pairings are how we make a cast,” commented Fahey...