Word: authority
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...crack at a political novel. No novelist, but a knowing man on the subject of politicians, Allen Drury, U.S. Senate correspondent for the New York Times, thus stepped into a near vacuum in U.S. letters. His Advise and Consent is the August Book-of-the-Month Club choice, and Author Drury thought he could afford to be adamant when the B.O.M. asked him to cut his great prose pudding. So it comes to the reader with all its fat intact, but no one really interested in the workings of Washington politics will complain too much...
...that the nomination should be withdrawn?. When Senator Brigham Anderson of Utah, whose subcommittee is holding the hearings, discovers that Leffingwell has indeed lied about his past, it would seem that Advise and Consent has already gone on too long with echoes from a decade of news headlines. But Author Drury now shows how vindictive his challenged President can be, and how vicious a Senator touched by envy, spite or just the power bug. Utah's Brigham Anderson is himself vulnerable, and when his enemies dig up a homosexual incident in his wartime past, they drive him to suicide...
...country is "a pilot-study in Communist decay." As the stone of Red repression was temporarily rolled away and the life underneath suddenly laid bare, it became clearer than ever that the Communist state, even when men try to liberalize it, cannot do without coercion and police power. Author Gibney finds another way of saying this, in the words of a witty Polish intellectual. In a small Jewish congregation, so goes the story, a young Communist was puzzling about one of Stalin's famous slogans and asked: "Tell me, Comrade Rabbi, can you build 'socialism in one country...
...John Updike is an unusually gifted writer. His descriptions are fresh and evocative, his epigrams have flair, and his sense of the fashions of the times is unerring (he with a job in media and she with Scandinavian tastes, favoring natural wood and natural childbirth''). Unfortunately. Author Updike plays his talents cool; his passion for understatement seems to rule out all passion...
...Bridge on the Drina, by Ivo Andric. A Yugoslav author's history-haunted elegy to his native land...