Word: desertic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...isolated mission in the red Arizona desert, 40 miles from the nearest paved road, 85 eminent physicians and surgeons assembled last week at an odd sort of convention. The doctors had come from all over the U.S., partly for an outing but mainly to pay their respects to the mission's remarkable chief: big (235 Ibs.) Dr. Clarence G. Salsbury, 62, who is rounding out 20 years of medical missionary work among the Navajo Indians...
...Desert Fury (Hal Wallls; Paramount) is easy to take with tongue in cheek, impossible to take with a straight face. The story: Mary Astor, who runs a Western gambling joint, doesn't want her daughter, Lizabeth Scott, to take up with Gangster John Hodiak, who is acquiring a sun tan in the neighborhood. Burt Lancaster, a state trooper, loves her, and that ought to be enough for any girl. But there is no holding Lizabeth from love's false course until, in a frenzy of fisticuffs and old-fashioned auto-chasing, she realizes that Hodiak...
...Hodiak, she is modeling a different dress. This subtle device for denoting the passage of time gets pretty funny after a while. If you could be sure that it was meant to be funny, you could relax and enjoy it thoroughly. The one substantial point of reference in Desert Fury's bewildering world is Mary Astor, who is at once attractive, amusing and vigorously convincing as the hardbitten, hard-biting mother...
Liberia never had much of a chance. Founded by the American Colonization Society as a home for freed slaves from the U.S., it got its independence in 1847 chiefly because nobody was looking. It was ridden by sleeping sickness and plagued by the Harmattan wind from the Sahara Desert, whose parching breath cracks furniture and leaves books curled up. Some 15,000 freed American slaves and their descendants had established a ruling class. As late as 1930, a League of Nations commission discovered that Liberia's Vice President Allen Nathaniel Yancy himself was head of a ring of slavers...
...pressed on. The world had seldom seen anything to compare with this epic migration: here were a whole people with their newborn and their aged, their cattle, their faded wedding dresses, their precious hoards of gunpowder and nutmeg, unfalteringly crossing half a continent to find a kingdom in a desert...