Word: acrid
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While Harry Truman was in Germany for the Potsdam Conference, he offered to help Ike win "the presidency in 1948." But Ike firmly declined. He came home to become Army chief of staff and to get an acrid noseful of the seamier side of statecraft when he fought for interservice unification. He did not want any political post, he snapped angrily to a reporter in 1946, "from dogcatcher to Grand High Supreme King of the Universe." But the following year he wrote to his old chief of staff Bedell Smith more thoughtfully: "I do not believe that...
...three nations carved out of French IndoChina-lay in its habitual half-slumber beside the Mekong River. It was the Buddhist Lent in Laos. Temple gongs bonged in the viscous humidity; saffron-robed monks strutted about beneath gaudy parasols or sat cross-legged in the shade, puffing acrid French tobacco and sipping lemonade. Suddenly there was a stir. Official limousines swept out of the royal palace amid shrieking sirens and flapping royal banners (a three-headed elephant against a red background), bearing Prime Minister Prince Souvanna Phouma to the airport to meet his half brother Prince Souphanou Vong, who happened...
Shredded bits of carpeting, an acrid smell around the wreckage -like burned-out fireworks -and a greyish residue on some of the bits of the plane all indicated high explosives. Technicians from the FBI and the Douglas Aircraft Co. were summoned, and a crew of 40 men was dispatched to pick up every fragment of the plane, and cart it all back to Denver. There, in a warehouse near the airport, the experts began the painstaking job of fitting the fragments together again...
...members wheeled about the galleries, was an array of the styles that have turned contemporary painting into a seething, uncharted sea of rival techniques, fads and dead-end experiments. They ranged from the surface violence of U.S. Painter Willem de Kooning's grotesque female portraits to the acrid brilliance of German painters like Fritz Winter, still haunted by Klee and Kandinsky. Paint surfaces varied all the way from Holland's Karel Appel, who trowels on paint like a pastry cook slathering on frosting, to the latest French vogue for tachism (staining), where thin paint trickles down the canvas...
...result is hard to read, and harder still to characterize. Yet ten years afterwards, at a time when the spate of war books is slowly drying up. Author Johnston, now an English professor at Mount Holyoke College, has resurrected the realities of war with eerie, acrid pungency...