Word: detail
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Russian Orthodoxy one of the world's largest religious communities. As the report's author observes, even pliant church leaders have "always held and always will hold positions alien to Marxism." Perhaps the most telling indication of the failure of Soviet religious restrictions comes in a statistical detail. The Patriarchate annually prints and distributes over 1 million "garlands and prayers," paper strips inscribed with religious pictures and text that are placed in the coffin during Orthodox funerals. Since that is roughly 60% of the annual U.S.S.R. mortality rate, such a large-scale printing can only mean that however...
...play set in a union hall, "Lefty" dramatizes the taxicab strike that plagued New York in the spring of 1934. Lefty is the union leader, for whom the drivers are waiting before they take a vote on whether to strike. In a series of flashbacks, several of the men detail their reasons for voting to strike. One of the heavy-handed scenes has a young wife telling her cabbie husband that she will accept the advances of an old admirer unless he starts bringing home more money. The flashbacks continue until it is announced that Lefty has been beaten...
More damaging, though is the staggering detail in the book and the author's attempt to find deep psychological meaning in every slight object or detail. She wants to find eternity in every grain of sand but ends up looking at an ocean of sand...
...times, this attention to detail borders on the ludicrous. In the course of an analysis of Odets's family, for instance, one learns that his mother was a delicate child, "spoiled by her gaunt mother, who would secretly give her the giblets on the rare occasions when there was a chicken." Further on, the poultry perspective continues, as one finds Odets's mother "still confiding to Ida Mae her longing for her dead mother (who had saved bits of chicken...
...printed pieces, Thurber was a master of turning a homely personal detail--his troubles with his housekeepers, say, or the night his bed collapsed--into an affecting, hilarious story. Thurber's character Walter Mitty, reduced to a life of fantasy in an otherwise banal existence, remains the quintessential twentieth-century nebbish...