Word: authoring
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Code by Verlaine. As Author Ryan spells out in detail, the Germans knew almost to the hour when D-day was coming and fluffed their unparalleled opportunity to mangle the invasion forces. As early as January 1944, wily Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, then chief of German intelligence, had briefed Lieut. Colonel Hellmuth Meyer, intelligence officer and chief of a radio-monitoring unit with the Pas-de-Calais-based Fifteenth Army, on the code message with which the Allies would alert the European underground for the invasion. It consisted of the first two lines of the poem Chanson d'Automne...
...hours that he had prophetically claimed would decide the fate of Germany were over. In a mixture of egocentrism and utter despair, he said to his aide: "If I was Commander of the Allied forces right now, I could finish off the war in 14 days." Author Ryan leaves one question tantalizingly unanswered: How did Mrs. Rommel like the grey suede shoes...
Michener's gigantic work loses pace in its final section, as the descendants of the New Englanders and their upstart adversaries seem to forget both animosities and identities, and the author drums busily for tourism and statehood (the novel was finished before statehood came last spring). Honolulu Resident Michener strives hard for a lyric quality as the two-party system triumphs and the barons and their onetime vassals sit happily together on the same interlocking directorates. But after all the blood and gusto, such gentle music is hardly audible...
Long before his death in 1931. Poet Vachel Lindsay was out of date; chanting about the heartland seemed naive to readers caught by the puzzles of The Waste Land. In the age of Eliot. Lindsay was remembered chiefly as the eccentric and faintly embarrassing author of two throbbing poems, the boomlay-booming Congo and General William Booth Enters into Heaven. Yet 15 years earlier, few had doubted that he was a genius. Author Eleanor Ruggles (Prince of Players: Edwin Booth) avoids outright judgment, but the sum of her sympathetic, somewhat sentimental biography seems correct: Lindsay was less than a major...
...reader may pay for an author's talent and get only his company. Charles Dickens is good company, but this collection of short stories, articles, sketches and short novels displays few of his virtues and almost all of his melodramatic devices. It is chockablock with phantoms, haunts, ominous coincidences, infants lowered into tiny graves to ascend as tiny angels, would-be suicides snatched back at the dark river's edge, pregnant maidens abandoned by heartless cads. This is the Dickens who wrung out Victorian soap opera's dampest hour, and posted "cry now" signs at every chapter...