The posthumous "Slouching Toward Nirvana" (Ecco, $27.50) is the author's own selection of some of the best of his early work.Bukowski seems to write exactly as he spoke, with a kind of delightfully raw and untutored pugnaciousness.
Their pugnaciousness has energised donors and activists.
With a flash of pugnaciousness, he said that debate should also close on his healthcare reforms so derided by his political foes.
And while his in-your-face, ur-New York pugnaciousness isn't to everybody's taste, I'm convinced that a winning plurality of Democrats would have found it an entertaining change from Bloomberg's Olympian flatness and an exciting contrast to the relative dullness of the rest of the Democratic field.
The distinctive Nixonian blend of pugnaciousness and self-pity comes through clearly in the 297 pages.
The usage guru Bryan A. Garner told me that he long admired Kilpatrick's pugnaciousness and iconoclasm.
He certainly demonstrates a similar steely resolve, pugnaciousness and disdain for consensus politics that was the hallmark of the Iron Lady.
That pugnaciousness may return: Bast said last week that he was finding new corporate sponsors, that he was building a new small-donor base that was "Greenpeace-proof", and that in any event, the billboard had been a fine idea anyway because it had "generated more than $5m in earned media so far".
He is mild-mannered, too, and does not appear to share the ideological pugnaciousness and cultural resentfulness of his putative future colleagues Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
Since her announcement in Hong Kong, Cheung had been inundated with questions from bankers, investors, and securities analysts about the fate of the company, and this had sharpened her characteristic pugnaciousness.
Such pugnaciousness would only have made matters worse.
