Word: fatalism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...children and adults who catch it, German measles (rubella) is almost invariably a trivial infection with slight fever, sore throat and fast-disappearing rash. But contracted by a woman during pregnancy, especially in the first three months, rubella is often hideously deforming or fatal to her unborn child...
George gets them. His trials begin with the sudden death of his talented older brother Jeff, who had designed and built the Tower in the West, one of the first skyscrapers in St. Louis. Six months after the fatal accident, George learns that his brother's widow is pregnant by another man. To protect Jeff's good name, he marries her and breaks the heart of true-blue Margaret Carton, who has been patiently waiting for his proposal. George now proceeds to mishandle the affairs of his stepchildren, loses control of his brother's monumental Tower...
DOUBTING THOMAS, by Winston Brebner. A brief, deceptively simple novel whose hero, a clown, brings a timely reminder that the fatal flaw of any totalitarian regime is its congenitally inhuman disregard of humanity's best impulses...
...Fountain's fatal weakness is an unnatural and very unmusical style of dialogue. Modeled on Victorian storybooks for young readers (e.g., "Children, is it not about this time that the lapegeria comes out at Kew?"), it makes all the characters, without exception, sound like awkward, clockwork dolls. Too bad, because Rebecca West's descriptions of period colors, clothes, homes and mealtimes recapture the world of half a century ago as brightly as a painted canvas...
...Virginia's cultists, the Gray plan had a fatal defect: it offered local option on desegregation, and the Washington suburb of Arlington, for one, announced that it would integrate. Urged on by the hard core of his political following, Harry Byrd decreed against Virginia's white children being thus mixed in school (although many of them play unaffectedly with Negro youngsters from babyhood). At Byrd's bidding, Governor Stanley called a special legislative session and presented it with 23 bills, setting up a "defense in depth" against desegregation. As passed by the legislature, the program ensured...