Word: cliches
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With anything less than the Messrs. Ritchard and Mayehoff, all this would be no better show business than it is playwriting. But Mayehoff has no equal at harrumphing or at jerking his head, at skinning a cliché or stuffing a shirt or making very little sound like even less. And no one has quite the lost-in-a-balloon aplomb or the Mad-King-of-Bavaria hauteur of Cyril Ritchard. At the same time no one knows more surefire tricks. Ritchard will do as many absurd and outrageous things to keep an audience amused as a desperate father will...
...clich...
...events and characters of most historical novels about the U.S. West are interchangeable parts that have worn smooth with use. But in 1947 Montana's Alfred Bertram ("Bud") Guthrie Jr. took the opening of the West away from the cliché specialists with The Big Sky, a knowing, realistic book about the early traders, trappers and scouts that was as unashamedly rich in poetic evocation as it was in gritty plain talk. In 1949 came The Way West, a sober but richly authentic account of the great migration by wagon to the Pacific coast. Guthrie's new book...
...first natural home: some atomic-age pundits fear that it may also be his last. Oddly, however, though man has probed earth's atmosphere, mapped its surface, scaled its highest peaks and scraped its ocean bottoms, he has largely neglected the myriad subterranean realms. In alpine cliché, a mountain is climbed "because it is there." The spelunker's incentive is that a cave is never even "there" until it is found and its depths are plumbed and proved. Mountaineering has its classic literature−Annapurna, The White Tower, etc.−but caves, mysterious, magnificent and challenging...
Unfortunately, A House on the Rhine is termite-ridden with bygone clichés ("Don't bring her into this vile business. She's made of other clay"). But Author Faviell's dramatic documentation of the lawless legacy of the war and "the clash of old and new values in the mind of young Germany has the authority of her seven years of on-the-spot observation as the wife of a British official. Read simply as social prophecy, this novel disturbs with the suggestion that the seeds of a whole generation may already have been planted...