Word: cress
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Church's position in the Princess Margaret-Peter Townsend brouhaha: "The inevitable mush-headed vicar has put in his appearance . . . There could be a slightly Gilbert and Sullivanish flavor to the whole affair-royal background, star-crossed lovers, Episcopal blunderbuss, aging clerical sap, now for the mustard and cress-if it weren't all so desperately troubling . . . The lives of two people . . . her duty and his ... a chaotic moral theology . . . Romantic individualism was masquerading as the Gospel-is there anyone not moved to the, deepest and most penitent intercession for all concerned...
Today. Sleepy Huntsville, "the water cress capital of the world," came alive almost overnight; its easy Southern cadences intermixed with the get-it-done twang of Yankee technicians and the business-first guttural of the German scientists. Although only one of the cotton mills now remains in operation, Huntsville thrives as never before on an $81-million-a-year Army payroll. Where once Huntsville extended a mile in each direction from its yellow brick courthouse, it now covers 40 square miles, with gracious antebellum homes, squalid Negro slums, and $15,000-per-unit development homes for Redstone...
Dabbing at her own nose occasionally as she turns 13-because her classmates have thus far failed to single her out for admiring attention-Cress resolves to be a "character." Her trademark, she decides, will be Craziness, and pretty soon long-suffering Pa & Ma Delahanty begin to find around the house lists of premeditated behavior, e.g., "Useful Gags for Craziness. I. Clothes, A. Shoes, 1. Unmatched." One of her projects is to wait until she gets on the school bus before putting on her shoes. This gets her a squib in the school paper and passing fame as the author...
Like a fresh tennis ball, Cress loses a little fuzz after each encounter with life, but goes on bouncing through another dozen escapades, all readable, if predictable. There is the schoolgirl crush on her piano teacher, a puppy-love phase with the spindly, spectacled whiz of the Latin class, the first cigarettes, first house parties, first pimples...
...novel's end, Cress's folks call her back from college to be at her dying grandfather's bedside. In a scene less solid than symbolic, Cress, now 16, gets her diploma from girlhood, and finally meets, in the fact of her grandfather's death, a reality larger than herself...