Word: brutalizes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...author declares that they have all been carefully checked. Now & then she makes an obviously earnest attempt to analyze the Soviet point of view-to understand why a revolutionary government which inherited a "top-heavy, illiterate and decomposing" empire should think that any means of maintaining itself, however brutal, are justified. What happened in Poland, the author concludes, can never be understood in European terms: it was the application of old, half-Asiatic techniques, modified-or intensified-by 20-odd years of Marxist expediency and justice...
...past 22 years, went to court in Manhattan and gave a new publishing firm (Allen, Towne & Heath, Inc.) a blazing sendoff on its very first book. Title: Koussevitzky. Author: ex-Boston Music Critic Moses Smith. The maestro sued to stop publication. The book, he complained, "describes me as ... incompetent . . . brutal ... a poseur . . . attacks my integrity . . . impugns my loyalty and slanders a lifetime of work." Besides, complained the maestro, it might spoil the sale of a literary project of his own: the Koussevitzky autobiography...
...simple-mindedness of the story is saved once in a while by Steinbeck's incidental touches. His chapters on Alice's solitary jag and on Camille's tired parrying of Louie, a diffident but brutal tinhorn Don Juan, are clever little stories in themselves. He writes with delicacy of the blundering stratagems and satisfactions of an adolescent mechanic called Pimples. But in theme and design the novel is a disappointing piece of second-rate, back-to-the-bulls fiction. Moreover, Steinbeck writes carelessly. Mrs. Pritchard has never known a day's pain on page...
...show, Lachaise's academic portrait studies were elegant as ever, but to a new generation of untutored eyes his swollen little abstractions of parts of the body seemed simply unpleasant, and the mountainously female figures on which his real fame depends carried bovine principles of beauty to a brutal and humorless extreme. Some of his figures were life-size or larger, most of the others were only about a foot high, but they all loomed...
...becomes a ghastly sequence of horrors- or, as some may see it, a small-scale presentation of the fate of pure intellect in the clutches of today's harsh world. Slowly, inexorably, the new Mrs. Kien invades her hapless husband's ivory tower, teams up with the brutal janitor of the building to throw Kien out and sell his priceless library. Half-crazy, half-beaten to a pulp by his elephantine wife, Kien runs out into the streets-of which he is as ignorant as a babe-and takes shelter in a dive inhabited solely by petty racketeers...