Word: shiftless
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...clear how deeply she has preplanned them and how much they are inspired responses to the shifting circumstances of her shiftless victims. But in a day when intricate plotting has become a lost art, one of Cousin Bette's great pleasures is its capacity to plausibly surprise. It's not its only pleasure. Lange's work is wonderfully controlled, her hidden passions expressed with glancing delicacy. And stage director Des McAnuff, making a smashing film debut, subtly poises the endless, deadly ironies of this tale against the efficiently suggested feverishness of Paris just prior to the revolution of 1848. Rarely...
...misfit who wonders how everyone else manages to cope. This time out, it's Barnaby Gaitlin, who turns 30 during the course of this story without having acquired any noticeable trappings of success. "A rented room," his ex-wife Natalie chides him, "an unskilled job, a bunch of shiftless friends. No goals and no ambitions...
...laziness and some vile sense of been-there-seen-that. I can't imagine a world without AIDS. Gay people have been marked, although I disagree with neo-con gay activists who claim that AIDS has taught gay people responsibility, as if, prior to the plague, homos were all shiftless and madcap. What AIDS has done is to make gay death terrifyingly ordinary. And yes, I know that the vast majority of people with AIDS are not gay, but I so rarely get invited to their memorials or their fund raisers honoring Angela Lansbury. I am also aware that equally...
...debate over welfare reform has divided Americans between those who consider recipients to be hapless victims and those who see them as shiftless parasites. Washington Post reporter Leon Dash's Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America (HarperCollins; 279 pages; $23) gives both sides powerful evidence to support their position. It will also leave fair-minded readers in both camps equally discomfited...
...Arias is a societal malignancy, a weak, charming, tirelessly manipulative man who inspires thoughts of therapeutic homicide in almost everyone who knows him. We met him a couple of years ago in Richard North Patterson's crisp courtroom drama, Degree of Guilt. There he was a minor character, the shiftless, sponging husband of the heroine, attorney Terri Peralta. Since then Richie has metastasized, and in Patterson's new legal thriller, Eyes of a Child (Knopf; 590 pages; $25), his rottenness drives the action. His psychology is that of an exceedingly clever stalker, and after Terri moves out with their...