Word: awkwardnesses
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...cast-iron conservative, Treasury Secretary George Humphrey found himself in an embarrassing and awkward role last week: defender of the biggest peacetime budget in the nation's history. The budget that President Eisenhower had just sent to Congress called for expenditures of $71.8 billion in 1958, nearly $3 billion more than in fiscal 1957 (ending next June 30). It was a balanced budget, but the estimated surplus, $1.8 billion, was too narrow to permit tax cuts. Ike proposed to use it to pare a chip off the $270-odd billion national debt...
...challenger's defense was better than his awkward, plodding style suggested; his offense was a barrage of punches from everywhere. In the 14th round his slashing gloves split open old scar tissue, and the champion's left eye leaked blood. "Rip 'at eye wide open, Gene, rip it open," pleaded an ex-Robinson rooter in the 19th row. Sugar Ray fought back with a tired, sometimes frenzied grace, but he was punched out. No one could quarrel with the judges' unanimous decision that Gene Fullmer was winner of at least eight of the 15 rounds...
...submarines to launch such missiles will have to be specially built and unusually big. The Navy has not revealed how the missiles will be stowed on board. They may be carried in firing position in vertical cells, or, if this is too awkward, they may be carried lying down and be raised toward the vertical by a launching mechanism. The missile-subs will be nuclear-powered so they can hide off an enemy coast for months before loosing their missiles. The first such submarine especially designed to fire the Polaris will be launched in four or five years...
...books, The Bernal Díaz Chronicles, is the first new English version in 50 years of Díaz' famed history of Cortés' conquest of Mexico. The new translation is so smooth that the story gains as a narrative but lacks something of the awkward dignity with which the proud old soldier must have recalled his years of service under Cortés. The book inevitably evokes Herodotus-another old soldier who lived to remember and tell-as Díaz begins: "I am an old man of 84 and have lost my sight...
...Fountain's fatal weakness is an unnatural and very unmusical style of dialogue. Modeled on Victorian storybooks for young readers (e.g., "Children, is it not about this time that the lapegeria comes out at Kew?"), it makes all the characters, without exception, sound like awkward, clockwork dolls. Too bad, because Rebecca West's descriptions of period colors, clothes, homes and mealtimes recapture the world of half a century ago as brightly as a painted canvas...