Word: dos
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...Century, by John Dos Passes. This novel is a kind of documentary film of the times, done with all the skill, though less of the startling freshness, that marked the author's famed U.S.A...
...philosophical anarchist but a rebel with a lofty cause, the brotherhood of man. Bedeviled by whisky and women, his behavior is far from lofty. He spends half his time righting his course after wronging himself in one inane way or another. Yet labor's first freedom fighters, Dos Passos implies, came from the likes of Blackie Bowman, with his inarticulate urge to dignity and his roundhouse rage for justice...
Barracuda Waters. Not all of Dos Passos' sad sagas involve labor unions. Jasper Milliron is a driving venture capitalist who hopes to give an old-line baking-powder company a technological transfusion. Instead he sees his dream bleed to death in the barracuda waters of corporate executive suites. "Man is a creature that builds institutions," writes Dos Passos. The larger moral of Midcentury is that these institutions in turn grow so big and rigid, corrupt and powerful that they crush and entrap the builders. Whether it is bigness or power spawned by bigness that corrupts, big labor can scarcely...
Liberal critics may be tempted to dismiss Midcentury as a piece of biological conservatism brought on by the author's 66 years. Yet Dos Passos also still tilts at the U.S. commercial spirit. In pages dotted with ad slogans, he even achieves a kind of running parody of the affluent society, e.g., "KEEPS A MAN so ODOR-FREE A BLOODHOUND COULDN'T FIND HIM," "DON'T BE A DISHWASHER. BUY ONE," "IF YOU KNOW THE WOMAN WHO SHOULD HAVE THIS...
...Dos Passos has lost much of the freshness, originality and compelling force he had in U.S.A. Still, Midcentury compresses the events of recent decades into a remarkable kind of living newspaper. Yesterday's paper is always dead, but the paper of ten years before yesterday is hypnotically alive. Dos Passos does not try to see beyond the headlines; he knows that history is headlines, plus elapsed time. He lets time itself etch the irony, write the parody, underscore the pathos. To relive history, as Dos Passos makes clear, is not all pleasurable nostalgia; it is also to feel...