Word: reader
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Casey confused? His manner may be bumbling and his mumble legendary, but associates contend that Casey, a speed-reader with an ability to assimilate complex information quickly, has one of the sharpest minds in the Government. "Bill Casey's the brightest guy I've met in my life," declares Stanley Sporkin, a former CIA counsel and now a federal judge. Casey's speech grows softer and less articulate, intimates say, when he does not like the questions being put to him. "His mumble becomes decidedly worse when he has to talk to Congress," notes one old friend. Anne Armstrong, chairman...
Doonesbury has earned Trudeau a reputation for ferocity: in the waning days of the 1980 campaign, a character in the strip toured a largely vacant expanse purporting to be "Reagan's brain." The President has returned the compliment. A devoted reader of what he calls the "funny pages," Reagan blasted the strip in October 1984, and has since said that he always skips over Doonesbury. Yet Rap Master Ronnie is outwardly as genial as the President it satirizes. This Reagan (Jim Morris) smiles incessantly; he may be befuddled but he is never cruel. That was a strategic choice by Trudeau...
Although the book succeeds in illuminating a previously understudied area of immigration history, Bailyn frustrates the reader with his long explanations of his numerous charts and tables. Struggling through the first third of the book is worthwhile, however, as he goes on to display his unique ability to imagine and to sketch the lives of these British emigrants based on the thin documentation that remain...
Much of a reader's pleasure lies in the urbanity with which Schlesinger rebuts received wisdom, as when in three crisp sentences he demolishes the ruling cliche of '80s politics: "Ronald Reagan is cited as the inevitable product of the television age. But Reagan, one surmises, would have been equally successful in the age of radio, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, or in the age of newsreels, like Warren G. Harding, or in the age of steel engravings and the penny press, like Franklin Pierce. Presidential candidates in the television era -- Johnson, Nixon, Humphrey, McGovern, Ford, Carter, Mondale -- hardly constitute...
Where else could a reader find in one place that the most popular numbers on a roulette wheel are 17 and 29, that until the mid-19th century, many Swiss believed washing the feet weakened the eyes, or that the absentminded Voltaire once began a letter "My dear Hortense" and ended it "Farewell, my dear Adele"? Where else is it written that 22 of the 633 men aboard Lord Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar were Americans, that the Syrian general Nicator fainted at the sound of a flute, that the 1883 explosion of the Krakatoa volcano was the loudest sound...