Word: dumb
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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WEINBERG'S slum background contrasts so sharply with that of the traditional Ivy League Wall Streeter that he uses it as an asset, plays up his Brooklyn background ("I'm just a dumb guy from P.S. 13"). One of eleven children of a wholesale liquor dealer, he never got farther than P.S. 13, started with Goldman. Sachs as a $3-a-week porter's assistant. After a World War I stint in the Navy, he became a securities trader, a Goldman, Sachs partner in 1927, helped to run investment trusts, including Goldman, Sachs Trading Corp., which proved...
...OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN, by Pierre Boulle (281 pp.; Vanguard; $3.50), is another one of those novels that try to prove that good and kind Americans are really dumb Americans. Ironic Frenchman Boulle (The Bridge over the River Kwai) is too blasé to join forces openly with embittered Briton Graham (The Quiet American) Greene, but he makes it plain in his book that there is no place for naive, warmhearted U.S. do-gooders in cold-war country. True to his Gallic instincts, he makes his American boob a woman. Patricia is the wife of a Frenchman who expertly...
...puzzled by the reference in your kindly review of Our Man in Havana to my slipping in a cruel] pointless carica ture of a dumb U.S. businessman." I can't remember any such character...
...violence is parodied too, but in a sly way that permits the moviegoer to lick his lips over the horror just before he sees the humor of a situation-or vice versa. One moment, for example, the audience is snickering at a dumb chorine, and the next it is staring aghast at her lifeless body in a bathtub that seems at first glance to be full of raspberry soda-very picturesque in Metro-color. And during a mob war, when a punk catches a packet, does he do the conventional clutch-and-crumple? Not at all. He explodes...
...family have died or been scattered. He lives on in a desolation of scene and spirit that the French, under the fashionable name of existentialism, have jazzed up as something to be talked about; here it is something to be felt. Fury rejects, out of his own dumb innocence, every kind of forged card of identity offered him. He finds himself redeemed in a trance of love. That part of the book is pure corn-a simple and nourishing product...