Word: burnett
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mother and Son, by Ivy Compton-Burnett, showed the aging (63) British novelist near the top of her brilliant form. She dealt with the tyranny of Momism, English upper-class variety, with the simple, brilliant device that has served her during 15 novels: human speech...
...next caper -the stickup of the exclusive Tropico Hotel. Shelley keeps mooning at the snowy WarnerColor peaks of the High Sierras and speculating that it must be mighty clean up there. "Cold, too," says Jack, and goes back to laying his plans. Scripter W. R. (This Gun For Hire) Burnett still has about 30 minutes to kill before he can get around to his killing finish; so he sends Palance off on a romantic goose chase after a farmer's daughter (Lori Nelson), who has a tendency to the same high-flown appreciation of CinemaScopic nature as Shelley...
Died. R. W. ("Dick") Burnett, 57, millionaire oilman, sole owner of the Dallas Eagles of the Texas League (for which he paid a record $500,000 in 1949), named Minor League Executive of the Year in 1953 for his partially successful fight to give the minor leagues a larger voice in making baseball rules; of a heart ailment; in Shreveport...
...hearing this, Miranda drops dead-and the slaves are suddenly free. Or rather, they have that illusion, for Author Compton-Burnett devotes the rest of Mother & Son to hammering home a vital truth: those who consent to live under tyranny can never be released from it, not even by the death of the tyrant. The bereaved men make desperate proposals of marriage; eager spinsters hurry to accept them; but it is no use. By the last page, everything is just as Miranda would want it: both her men have proved unmarriageable, bound by force of habit and inclination...
...strength and weakness of Mother & Son lie, as always in a Compton-Burnett novel, in the long dialogues in which characters of every age vie with one another in calling a spade a spade, thereby turning it into a hatchet. Sometimes the talk is mere tasty acid drops ("I have not the courage to live on charity ..." "I have the courage but not the chance"); sometimes it is compactly expressive of universal human attitudes ("Let me persuade you to try our fruit. We can buy much better, but we take a pride in our own"). Many of the remarks...