trenchant

Chapter 8 explores Jacobs' narrative "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" alongside Harper’s letters, poetry and speeches as among the most trenchant and still underexplored philosophical commentaries on how the United States might redress the systemic wrongs that conditioned the ideology of racial feudalism.

Smith understood how her features cut into and through a role – wide eyes amply lidded, trenchant cheekbones, features that one might associate with snobbery.

But a more trenchant quote for our times might come from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, written about a decade after Yeats’ poem: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

“Insofar as people use The Power Broker as a guide to inform their own political values today, I think there is a risk of overextending its lessons. It makes no more sense to assume The Power Broker explains New York today any more than it would’ve for New Yorkers in the ’70s to think The Gangs of New York offered trenchant insights about Abe Beame.”

In 1948, Gore Vidal published “The City and the Pillar,” about a gay man’s struggle to find companionship before and after World War II. In 1956, Baldwin published “Giovanni’s Room,” a trenchant tale of social pressures destroying a gay couple in postwar Paris.