Word: raconteur
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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DIED. HERB CAEN, 80, classic newspaper columnist; in San Francisco. In the brightly written rat-a-tat of the daily column he produced for 58 years, mostly in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Pulitzer-prizewinning Caen was raconteur, funnyman, tipster, nightclubber, friend of the powerful and tireless chronicler of "Baghdad by the Bay," the city he loved and that loved him back...
Hassan is a magnificent, flinty raconteur. He says things that would never be considered politically correct and are sometimes difficult to swallow, but he is fiercely unapologetic. He speaks with a forthrightness and integrity that not even flourishes of rhetoric can disguise. He is also marvelously entertaining and has a way with maxims that would put La Rochefoucauld to shame. One priceless example: "Love sits on a dungheap, and woe to him that slips...
...beginning with the topic of coming out. We hear the 73-year-old minister's poignant admission that he could have sex with his wife only by pretending that she was a man. Bob Hawks, a film exhibitor in his fifties who is also the documentary's most wonderful raconteur, discusses a teenage fascination with the young Robert Stack's "perky nipples," Hawks provides a marvelously detailed Proustian picture of gay bars in the `50s. He remembers "the thrill of having wool pants on that itched, and a white collar shirt that cut into your neck, and you were slow...
...there are strengths in her work as well. For one thing, Wolf is an engaging raconteur. Once at Swarthmore College she found herself berated by members of a seminar on women's studies as too elitist (she used compound sentences); too lax as an academic (she used endnotes instead of footnotes); too much of a sellout (she published with a mainstream press). Later, over beer and pizza, the same students turned out to be friendly and vulnerable, voicing their late-adolescent doubts about sexuality and self-esteem...
Baker -- no Cooper, but a classic Yank with a long, friendly, shovel-shaped face -- begins his new assignment on Sunday with Selected Exits, a biographical tribute to Welsh author and raconteur Gwyn Thomas, starring Anthony Hopkins. Already Baker has found that the job is like sailing a ship in a very small bottle. "Most of the time you have two or 2 1/2 minutes," he says. "That's one page, double-spaced. My columns are three pages. On TV, that would be like being Hubert Humphrey -- Will this guy ever shut...