Word: best
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sound track fills with singing birds and a music of axles, bright September blows into the theater, tingling in the thoughts like merry harvest weather. Director Dreyer loves the human face ("A land one can never tire of exploring"), and he has chosen his faces with a sure insight. Best of all, perhaps, are the faces of the pregnant woman (Birgitte Federspiel) and her husband (Emil Haas Christensen), which make a simple, touching revelation: that they are deeply and quietly and naturally in love...
...derisive manner of the best French writing, Aron indicts the French intelligentsia for committing treason against the West, and he does much to elucidate a mystery that bedevils the friends of France: Why, in the name of (and despite) their own traditions of freedom, are France's most vocal philosophers artists and scientists declared Soviet partisans or, at least, neutralists...
...LIGHT FOR FOOLS, by Natalia Ginzburg. A brief, near-poetic story of ordinary lives mired in the despair of Mussolini's Italy. Conceived in sympathy and written at the level of simple truth, it is one of the best Italian novels in years...
PLATERO AND I, by Juan Ramón Jiménez. One of the best-loved books of the Spanish-speaking world, by the 1956 Nobel Prizewinner-138 prose poems about life and death in the author's home town in Spain. The poems are addressed to the narrator's companion, a donkey, with bittersweet and sensuous grace and delicacy...
...LOVE POSSESSED, by James Gould Cozzens. The best U.S. novel of the year, wrought of many kinds of love and their power to strengthen or warp character, make or break the lives of man or woman. Through its lawyer hero, the book also deals with something most U.S. novelists have forgot about-man's responsibility...