Word: traces
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Diligent Pupil. As a comic actor, Tati has become over the years so closely calculating that he has lost all trace of spontaneity and humanity. His every gesture is self-conscious and self-congratulatory. As a director, he has become a great deal more elaborate but somewhat less inspired. Traffic's set pieces, like a large pile-up of cars in an improbable accident, all seem too cherished and worked over; they have a laboratory air about them...
ALTHOUGH SUCH A DISTINCTION between morality in consciousness and in action can hardly be as simple as Trilling implies, the whole task he has undertakes--to trace modern shifts in conscious moral categories--eventually makes this study tantamount to a much-abstracted cultural history of the past four centuries in the West. A lesser writer would have floundered under the awesomeness of the ordeal. But Trilling, with extraordinary breadth and specificity of knowledge, manages a plausible coherence in a sea of allusion, exploring and connecting literary, philosophic and psychological territory. He stages, in effect, a dialectical drama of many acts...
Failure. Such is his passion for the trades that Brennan, a Roman Catholic, has been known to trace their origin to Carpenter Jesus Christ. He has a craftsman's feeling for his country. "We build this country," he said at the time of the Wall Street march. "We build these beautiful buildings and churches and highways and bridges and schools. We love this country. We were afraid it was going down the drain and nobody was doing anything about it." Like other members of the craft unions, however, he is choosy about who gets to build. Because...
Mouthwash. Worst of all, black-market methadone is said to have caused hundreds of deaths last year. Figures can be misleading; they often include deaths resulting from heroin or other causes when a trace of methadone is found in the victim's body. Nevertheless, the death totals are rising...
...borne forward into the 20th century. Other writers-most notably Isaac Bashevis Singer-have handled this familiar theme with more versatility, more dramatic elan. Not all of the novel is totally alive, but Kotlowitz writes extraordinarily well at times. His act of conjuration is clear-eyed, without a trace of sentimentality...