Word: deaths
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Churchill recreates the time in absorbing detail. Here is London, aflame with nightly blazes but vigorously "adapting itself to the new peculiar conditions of existence or death," the factories in which "men and women toiled at the lathes . . . till they fell exhausted on the floor and had to be dragged away," the "vast intricate systems of fortifications . . . antitank obstacles, blockhouses," the secret rooms in which hidden scientists fought the "wizard war" of radar...
Nobody has written as well as this about toros and toreros since Heming way's Death in the Afternoon. Unlike Hemingway's masterpiece, which was part fine reporting and part esthetics, The Brave Bulls is a novel written up to the classic hilt, with the sweat of honest craftsmanship; it goes a long way toward being, like the corrida that is its climax "a combat without adornment, all tragedy, all truth...
...kind that most critics forgot to expect. The Brave Bulls has nothing, ostensibly, to do with the war, but the sand of the bull ring in this book is also the sand of the Peleliu beaches; the black and powerful truth that fills the book is the truth of death that marines learned on Peleliu's Bloody Nose Ridge...
...Dealing Death, In detail, The Brave Bulls is alive with precise knowledge: of the moods and lingo of bullfighters, the atmosphere and routine of a great Mexican breeding ranch, the elaborate ritual of the corrida itself. The writing is clumsy in places, but it is also direct, penetrating and sustained; it makes the slicker sorts of professionalism look pointless. And the book is, finally, both religious in its treatment of ultimates and morally eloquent in its strong rebuke for those who scorn any culture but their...
...festival of the bulls is the only art form in which violence, bloodshed and death are palpable and unfeigned. It is the only art in which the artist deals actual death and risks actual death, as if a poet were called upon to scan his lines with his life . . . All arts, even the most abstract, are essentially creations to thrill. To allow man to participate in God's designs at one step removed from the anguish of living them...