Word: crisp
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Tallulah Bankhead published a 326-page autobiography (Tallulah; Harper; $3.95), which began with a testy denial: "Despite all you may have heard to the contrary, I have never had a ride in a patrol wagon." From then on, most of the book is a series of crisp confessions which fascinated at least one early reader. The publishers eagerly snatched at a warm blurb from Harry S. Truman: "I haven't been able to put it down. Undoubtedly the most interesting book I've had in my hands since I have been President of the United States...
Author Wilson seems to see his novel as a modern morality play. In its terms, vulgarity is evil, good taste is grace, "to let life bore you" is the cardinal sin, and no one is ever saved from anything. His crisp prose style and his deft aim with the acid of satire keep his novel from being pointlessly sordid. But as the parade of homosexual flirts, pimps and spivs crosses its pages, it becomes uncertain whether Author Wilson is exploring the lower depths of England or of Hell...
General Sir Gerald Templer, Britain's crisp, aggressive High Commissioner for Malaya, is slowly gaining ground in his war with the Red guerrillas. He has some 400,000 troops, police and home guards against about 5,000 Communists. Malaya is laced with barbed wire, crisscrossed with searchlights, webbed with interlocking patrols. More & more Malays and Chinese are whispering against the bandits, although many fear Red reprisals. Templer recently uprooted 66 men, women & children from one village and put them in a detention camp for failing to inform against Communist assassins...
...Neat and crisp in his sharply pressed summer uniform, Ridgway called his first press conference since taking over from Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was firm about one thing: the soldiers under his international command should all be drafted for two years. "The reason is . . . that in this day of numerous and complex weapons, it takes approximately a year to train an individual in standard arms," he said. "Just when a state stands a chance of regaining some of its investment on the soldier, it loses...
...Graduate School of Design has risen to No. 1 rank among U.S. architectural schools, in part at least because of Walter Gropius (TIME, Jan. 21). He was renowned as the founder of Germany's famed Bauhaus school, and youngsters for whom the words Gropius and Bauhaus meant crisp, challenging modernism followed him to Harvard. There, amid the pink & white Georgian of the Yard, he and his collaborators built a modern brick and glass graduate center. But for the most part, Gropius built little, was content to be a teacher, one of the three division chiefs in the School...