Actually, using client-side JavaScript to replace the long text blocks with expand buttons and shorter text (as other monks have suggested) is the best way to handle this, because that will also gracefully degrade if the user blocks JavaScript, presenting all information, but in a less-convenient format.

Client-side JS code can also query the available display area and set CSS properties to hide only text as needed to accommodate some minimal number of records initially displayed at once. (You can collapse records at points chosen to ensure that N records will initially fit in the user's viewport, regardless of platform, but you will need to also handle the case where the viewport is too small to accommodate N records as further graceful degradation. You can test this by simply resizing a browser window to a small size and viewing the site.)

NoScript and similar extensions are commonly used as security measures because all or nearly all recent browser exploits have depended on JavaScript to function. I for one have a general policy of simply leaving sites that do not render with JavaScript disabled.