Word: crude
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...newest novelists to arrive on the Texas landscape is Madison Cooper of Waco-and he has come in like an oil well and come in big. Novelist Cooper is crude, all right, and he is such a wasteful gusher that it seems scarcely worth while capping the flow between the covers of a book; but he spews out so much of the rich stuff that he is very likely to flood the U.S. book market in the weeks before Christmas-if he doesn't scare most of the customers on to higher ground...
...Devil Rides Outside shows that it takes all grades of crude to make a literary Spindletop. It is the first novel of Dallas-born John H. Griffin, 32, a blind veteran of World War II. Author Griffin spoke his book into a wire recorder, and he talked far too much. He and his publishers (a Fort Worth firm whose first book this is) cut out 250 pages and could profitably have lopped off 200 more. But though Devil is crudely written as well as overwritten, it has some things relatively rare in U.S. letters: energy, earnestness and unashamed religious fervor...
Author Griffin's hero is a cardboard character in a contest of more powerful wills; the monks and most of the townspeople are mere symbols of good & evil. Nevertheless-and crude, awkward and febrile as it is-The Devil Rides Outside is kept bowling along by pure writing steam. It is often repetitive and frequently staggers to a stop, but it is saved each time by a fresh burst of vigor and intensity. At novel's end the musicologist returns to the monastery, and there is the promise that he will find God and inner peace. Author Griffin...
Thereupon Malaparte proceeds, with crude but cruel satiric effect, to lead a number of U.S. officers (and indirectly his readers too) on a macabre tour through the gutters of wartime Naples. He shows mothers who sell their children into prostitution; but then, says Malaparte with a smirk, there are also the children who would gladly sell their mothers. He dwells for part of a chapter on a street peopled with twisted female dwarfs, who fed, he asserts gleefully, on the unnatural lusts of the American ranks. Another chapter is concerned with a visit to a shop that sells blonde merkins...
...Last March he took his problem to Arizona's Senator Ernest W. McFarland, who persuaded the Petroleum Administration for Defense to okay the line. To benefit Arizona, Glasco agreed to tap his line with a $17 million refinery in Florence, Ariz, capable of processing 15,000 bbls. of crude a day. Glasco hopes to slash petroleum costs in Arizona drastically; they are now among the highest in the U.S., since every drop must be brought in by truck or railroad...