Word: brutalize
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...lobbying around U.N. headquarters in Manhattan to take command of the rebel campaign. Deploring the slayings in Angola, he insisted that his men had been ordered only to begin a campaign of sabotage and general disobedience, but had gotten out of hand when the Portuguese ordered a series of brutal repressions...
...crime that had everything. The cast of characters, including beautiful, amoral women and recklessly brutal men, seemed right out of the nouvelle vague French films. One of the nation's greatest fortunes was involved. Best of all, the crime itself was inspired by what Frenchmen believe to be the fountainhead of criminal violence...
What makes this novel so extraordinary is that it is both an allegory and a chronicle of despair. The style fluctuates rapidly between poetic vision and brutal realism. The characters are naturally symbolic, but at the same time human--although remarkable in their sensitivity. Ernie Levy is the six million Jews put to death by the "final solution," yet, at certain moments, he is a most ordinary human being. That M. Schwarz-Bart has been able for the most part to combine these two levels of his story successfully is a tribute both to his skill and his diligence...
...picked up running a joint in Hawaii. But this time the Pendleton is carrying combat veterans as well as the scraped-barrel group of the outward voyage. When Raditzer is caught cheating in a below-decks poker game, they decide to pitch him overboard. In a scene that is brutal and powerfully true, Charlie Stark as his protector is tried as Raditzer has not tried him before. And from there to the powerful ending, Stark suffers the agonies of a man who has tied himself unwillingly, irrevocably, to a wretched fellow human whose claim is based subtly on weakness. Author...
...lung disease; in New York City. A onetime Pinkerton agent who hung on to his job only because of the literary quality of his reports, Hammett contracted TB while an ambulance driver during World War I and, while convalescing, perfected a bone-clean prose style perfectly suited to a brutal world of crime in which private cops were as tough and cynical as crooks. Success led inevitably to Hollywood, where, after creating The Thin Man, he doctored scripts, became a leader of the left-wing coterie. In 1951 he served six months in prison for refusing to tell a federal...