Word: belongings
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Hammett could write. Into his bony prose went the conscientious effort of the craftsman whose best work escaped the literary basement where most mystery books belong. His Continental Op (for operative), based on the author's own experience as a Pinkerton detective, is authentically tough. All mystery stories are implausible, and so are Hammett's. But in his case the reader accepts their implausibility because the characters, particularly the Op himself-a fat, stubby, middle-aged man who never got a name and needed none, being an archetype-seem so real. "He put these people down on paper...
...Americans are profoundly drawn. All the great Western heroes from Daniel Boone on are revered and envied not merely for physical prowess but for attaining a free life, unfettered by civilization's rules. Today, the hero must find his niche very much inside civilization, and he will probably belong to the ranks of the specialist heroes. No intellectual can be a hero to those who don't read (except in France), nor any baseball player to a man who never goes to a game. But they have a common denominator-they expand the sense of human capability...
Adapted from a 1906 drama by Swedish Playwright Hjalmar Soderberg, Gertrud dawdles over the plight of an Ibsenish opera singer, a free and independent woman who regards love as unconditional surrender. "The man must belong to me completely," she says, and all intimations of psychological complexity stop right there. Having long since abandoned a famous erotic poet on grounds that he gave too much of himself to his stanzas, Gertrud is about to leave her husband (Bendt Rothe), a lawyer with Cabinet-level aspirations. Briefly, she tries a flighty playboy-pianist who decides that "the complete absorption of one another...
Unhappily, the prohibitions are not foolproof-vixens disturbed by a low-flying plane can go berserk and murder their cubs. And sometimes the prohibitions are limited to members of the immediate tribe-rats never bite rats that belong to their own colony, but two colonies of rats have been known to meet in a pitched battle that leaves hundreds of dead on the ground. These bloodbaths, Lorenz suggests, are epidemics of mass psychosis; they serve no rat-preserving purpose that he or any other naturalist can see. In general, he concludes ominously, a species is less often annihilated...
...small wooden homes that the behind them, begin the University's riverfront real estate. Eliot house marks the end. The character of the area has changed almost completely. The Houses and the Married student Dormitories teem with life, a few of their in-habitants vote, and broadly any really belong to Cambridge. To most, the city is a home for a few years and no more...