Word: fatalistic
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...placid lakes, stocked with fish, vacationers and beer cans. Only unregenerate wildlife cranks doubt that progress is served in the interests of flood control, irrigation, electrification and the outboard motor industry. Author John Graves is no crank, and from the evidence of his book, he is something of a fatalist. When he heard that a section of the Brazos River valley in the west Texas scrub country, where he grew up, was soon to be drowned by five dams, Graves did not tilt at turbines but said farewell...
Plunge into Bathos. Nixon is something of a fatalist and no stranger to tight spots. No spot could be tighter than the tense moment in the 1952 campaign when he was caught in the uproar over a Nixon trust fund and found not only Democrats but Dwight Eisenhower's lieutenants ready to throw him off the ticket. Completely on his own, he delivered his well-remembered nationwide TV speech in which he laid bare his personal finances and mentioned, in a plunge into bathos, that the only gift he ever had accepted was the little dog Checkers. The Checkers...
Birdlime in a Dell. It sounds like dismal stuff, but from the first lines of this play the Irish language contrasts with modern stage English as a cage of songbirds contrasts with a yardful of hens, and the reader is quickly caught in a Grand McGuignol of fatalist humor. Like Koestler, rumpled, mountainous Author Behan, 34, knows prison bars from the inside; he was sentenced in his teens to an English reformatory for dropping I.R.A. explosives into London mailboxes, has spent in all eight years in prison for assorted violence on behalf of Irish freedom. His dialogue flourishes with...
...from Denver on Nov. 1, 1955, with a dynamite time bomb he planted in his mother's luggage in the hope of collecting $37,500 in flight-insurance money; by the judgment of his peers (cyanide gas poisoning); in the gas chamber at the Colorado Penitentiary, Canon City. Fatalist Graham's observation before he was executed: "As far as feeling remorse for those people, I don't. I can't help it. Everybody pays their way and they take their chances. That's just the way it goes...
Tranquil Buddha. In a modest white palace overlooking the mile-wide Mekong sits worried 67-year-old King Sisavang Vong, afflicted with gout, but refusing all urgings that he leave his capital. Like his Thai people, the King is a fatalist. In the temples his people lay offerings and burn incense before tranquil, smiling images of Buddha, confident that whatever comes, it will inevitably change, as the mystic circle of life completes itself. It is exactly 500 years since Luang Prabang was last invaded...