Word: benignity
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...grown accustomed to his faces: Hitler the buffoon, Hitler the madman, Hitler the monster. Memoirs of a Confidant introduces us to Hitler the misunderstood idealist whose vision of peace and prosperity was distorted by his gangster lieutenants. The author of this benign nonsense was Otto Wagener, a forgotten Nazi who served as storm trooper chief of staff and party economist until his career was derailed by Rival Hermann Göring. According to the book's editor, Yale History Professor Henry Ashby Turner Jr., Wagener was lucky to escape Göring's blood purge of June 30, 1934. He spent...
...from many of these pictures, where the war sometimes seems a bizarre welter of chaos and formality, anarchy and self-conscious ceremony. The accumulated effect is not to mock human behavior as in-authentic but to acknowledge a yearning for dignity and order. Mydans' work springs from that same benign instinct. Through decades when each year put forward new varieties of suffering, he recorded the world's dislocations and helped to shape the heart's reply. --By Richard Lacayo
...rare attributes raise The Making of a Public Man beyond the category of benign memoir. One is Linowitz's talent for spare, telling portraits. Among them: Chester Carlson, the arthritic, scholarly patent attorney who, in a one-room laboratory behind a beauty parlor in Astoria, Queens, invented the process that made Xerox a name to copy. Linowitz tells how, as the firm's lawyer and later its chairman, he helped Carlson and Joseph Wilson, an impossibly energetic Rochester businessman, launch a product that ended up creating its own demand. The now ubiquitous machine, says Linowitz, "was a case where invention...
...very different sort of Bloody Mary are what readers might expect to find in Paul Kovi's Transylvanian Cuisine (Crown; $15.95). And, in fact, there is a recipe for stuffed bear's foot and another for brain sausages. For the most part, though, Kovi's dishes are more benign: juicy sauerkraut glowing with paprika, subtle tarragon-scented fish soup and mushroom-stuffed carp, crisp roast goose and leg of veal with goose liver, kohlrabi nestled in egg barley and, for a delicate touch, "blushing tomatoes in sour cherry vinegar." Eggplant, cornmeal, strudels and the fragrant honey cake mézeskal?...
...Robinson rejected the corporate life chosen by many of his Harvard classmates and went to Washington, eventually joining the staff of Michigan Congressman Charles Diggs. TransAfrica began in 1977, an outgrowth of Robinson's earlier work with the Congressional Black Caucus in organizing opposition to the Ford Administration's benign policies toward white rule in what was then Rhodesia. Money, most of it contributed by prominent blacks, was hard to raise. Recalls Robinson: "We came up with between $15,000 and $20,000, so we didn't know if we'd be in operation for more than a month...