Word: shrewdness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...importance, both to his contemporaries and to posterity. Sensible, independent, rather prim, Adams was among the first to advocate American independence, and he displayed a crucial steadying hand during his four years as Chief Executive while the toddling Republic stretched beyond baby steps. Filled with fascinating people, momentous events, shrewd insights and excerpts from letters between Adams and his wife Abigail, John Adams is a marvelous singing of a hero historically unsung...
...Trujillo transposed in Mario Vargas Llosa's novel The Feast of the Goat (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 404 pages; $25) is heartless and uncannily shrewd, a man whose political instincts and outsize lust were the twin pillars of his power. But personality goes only so far in maintaining authority. Vargas Llosa's scenes of official murder and sanctioned torture are fulsome enough to have been written by the other Mario, the late best-selling author Mario Puzo. Like the father of The Godfather, the Peru-born Vargas Llosa has a talent for the graphic. There are no horses' heads...
...darling of cinema’s intelligentsia. This relatively no frill treatment has restored the picture to an almost resplendent shine. Press photos, original trailers, advertising campaigns and storyboards abound, but the true treat is the audio commentary. Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert surprises with adroit and shrewd insight into the film’s technical aspects while Welles biographer Peter Bogdanovich fills in historical and personal minutia. This is the Citizen Kane we’ve all been waiting...
...Young Willie, like his father, is shrewd enough to the know the power of keeping his mouth shut. But he lacks the confident self-awareness to make things click. So it's surprising and not too convincing when Chandran turns out to have writing talent. He contributes scripts to the BBC and eventually publishes a collection of stories about India. Up to this point, aspects of Willie's life and early career are similar to those of Naipaul, a Trinidadian of Indian descent who took a degree at Oxford, worked for the BBC and wrote fiction. Unlike his protagonist, Naipaul...
...part of what has occasionally garnered Hitchens the title of media whore, along with his recurrent television news panel appearances (surely the fastest way to earn the label). To his credit, nearly all of Hitchens’s contributions to public dialogue have been generally meaningful and unfailingly shrewd. One could argue, too, that his brand of rootless intellectual promiscuity embodies his professed ideal of nonconformity in refusing to stay within the traditional alignments of a man of the left: by giving favors to all, he pledges allegiance to none...