Word: direful
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...novel, The Confidence-Man is a near miss, one of those pregnant and provocative failures that prove more rewarding to read than a whole litter of lesser writers' tidy but empty triumphs. Austere and philosophical, it sometimes seems all head and no tale. Despite its dire point of view, the book jests and jostles with life, and really belongs with the sardonic comic charades of Swift, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and Ben Jonson's Volpone. Like them, it is a kind of cosmic hangover suffered by a man who-having drunk overfull of the human race...
Part of The Public Philosophy is standard Walter Lippmann. He has written this new book in his usual scholar's style, which means that it will reach only a very small percentage of the people who, he believes, are in such dire need of knowledge. But the basic tone of The Public Philosophy is new. In his day Lippmann has been a champion of the New Deal's invented and chosen theories, a writer admittedly guided often by "hastily improvised generalizations." Never before has he shown such firm and specific regard for the natural law and for basic...
...thing, he misunderstands FOR's petition. He writes, "I will suggest that . . . they circulate the same petitions demanding that the surplus foods be circulated to South Viot Nam, where more than 350,000 homeless and hungry refugees, driven from their homes by the well fed Reds, are is dire need of subsistence." The Harvard FOR petition asked that the President send surplus food to all the needy, "regardless of political persuasion, particularly to Chins." The last three words would not have been added except for the insistence of the Dean's Office. No "homeless and hungry" people, including the refugees...
...needed by the Communists. I will suggest that as an alternative, they circulate the same petitions demanding that the surplus foods be circulated to South Viet Nam, where more than 350,000 homeless and hungry refugees, driven from their homes by the well fed Reds, are in dire need of substinence. Herbert A. Philbrick New York Herald Tribune
...private first class), Curtice rapidly rose to AC assistant general manager, vice president, and, at 36, president. Then, in 1933, came an opportunity born of disaster. General Motors' Buick, for years a notable success as the safe, sound and respectable "doctor's car," was in dire trouble. It had gone up in price, fallen behind in styling, grown fat and heavy (one model was inelegantly nicknamed the "pregnant Buick," the "bedpan Buick" and the "bathtub Buick"). When Depression struck, it hit Buick square in its middle-age spread, and Buick's share of the auto market dropped...