Word: bolls
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Like a sharecropper's abandoned cabin, Georgia's Taliaferro County has been quietly decaying for 30 years, until little is left but the shell. When the boll weevil destroyed the cotton crops of the '20s, the young people began to pull out and head for the cities. The population dropped from 8,841 in 1920 to 6,278 in 1940 to 3,370 today. It is falling still. Says Mrs. Grace Beazley, a county health worker: "Our families are just an old man and his wife sitting on the porch together...
...Miss Ellen" Gray, the well-bred widow who is the wispy heroine of Pierce's story, self-discovery is not easy. She spent her prewar life in an indolent dreamworld as soft and sheltered as a cotton boll, with endless maids and mammies to tend every want that a dutiful husband and son could not fulfill. The war killed both, and drove Miss Ellen from the family plantation to live with relatives in Raleigh; even then the protective cocoon of her gentility was scarcely damaged. In June 1865 she returns home with her widowed daughter-in-law, "Miss Lucy...
TOMORROW AND YESTERDAY (250 pp.)-Heinrlch Boll-Criterion...
Typo Trick. This fourth U.S.-published novel by Heinrich Boll (Adam, Where Art Thou? The Train Was on Time), best of Germany's postwar novelists, needs all his skill to emerge convincingly from a clumsy translation. A typographical trick of frequently capitalizing phrases and sentences, sometimes to convey the thoughts of children, sometimes for no discernible reason...
EVENTUALLY BECOMES ANNOYING. But at its persuasive best. Author Boll's book sounds a cry of giant despair. He is not writing of today's Germany but of the country as it was in the decade following the war-a country that managed to survive Nazi savagery and Allied destruction, being reborn not in hope but in selfish mediocrity; a society where guilty memories are screened behind lifeless living and where the intellectual tone is set by chattering pedants of the adaptable sort who are able to flourish equally under Naziism or democracy. The fact that today Germany...