Word: authority
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...their picture of American depravity, degeneration and despair, Soviet journalists used the propagandist's familiar technique of the half-truth and the fact wrested out of context. One recent article cited the high cost of U.S. medical care, but made no mention of compensating health insurance programs. The author also deplored the high tuition at Harvard, said nothing about tuition-free state and municipal schools, left the impression that only the children of the rich can go to college...
...thing I can assure you," said Novelist-Playwright Graham Greene two years ago. "There will be no miracles in my next play." To the evident delight of first-nighters at London's Globe Theater last week, Roman Catholic Author Greene proved as good as his word. The Complaisant Lover, in a sparkling production directed by Sir John Gielgud, flaunted none of the theologizing that pervades The Living Room and The Potting Shed; not once were sin and grace wheeled explicitly into battle during a soul's dark night. Instead, Greene's latest is a secular "black comedy...
...Author Greene considers The Complaisant Lover his best play, and the London critics-who were not notably stirred by his earlier stage tries-agreed enthusiastically. Amid the general applause, a minority of Greene fans hoped that he would not give up religious themes for good; quite a few playwrights have successfully written about manners and immorals, but few nowadays even attempt to deal with miracles...
CALIFORNIA STREET, by Niven Busch (377 pp.; Simon & Schusfer; $4.50), suggests that a subject too long neglected by writers' conferences is epigraphman-ship. Nothing subdues a reader more thoroughly than a cowcatcher of another author's prose or poetry, bolted to the front of a book or chapter. And no novelist now working is better equipped to conduct a seminar on the technique than Niven (Duel in the Sun) Busch. His current novel, about a moneyed San Francisco clan, has ten epigraphs-one at the beginning of each chapter. A Latin proverb assures doubters that the author...
...Author Busch blows lengthily but achieves only a slight turbulence. Anchylus Saxe, his publisher, is a routinely drawn old thunderer. His women, drunk or sober, are the four-martini kind-it would take that many snorts at a cocktail party to make them endurable. But for old newspaper hands who happen on the book, there is at least one reward-the characterization of a press lord so noble that he allows his own gossip columnist to malign a much-loved member of his family, because, by God, the facts are right...