Word: flaccidity
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TRIAL, by Don Mankiewicz (306 pp.; Harper; $3.50), is the $10,000 winner of the Harper Prize Novel Contest, but the ribbon it really earns is a piece of black crape. The book is a flaccid throwback to the I-never-had-a-chance school of social protest popular in the '30s. Author Mankiewicz, 32, nephew of movie Writer-Director-Producer Joe (The Barefoot Contessa) Mankiewicz, chooses as his hero-victim an 18-year-old boy of Mexican descent who lives in a Southern California town that draws its color line tight as a noose. Straying from "Mex Town...
...work which has replaced Bullfrog on the Bank as a staple of Ivy League glee clubs. In comparison with the virile Amherst version we heard two years ago, Princeton's performance was disappointing. The striking dissonances were merely out of tune; rhythms that should have been incisive were flaccid...
...after Stalin's death was proclaimed, the world learned the name of his successor: Georgy Malenkov, gross and flaccid in appearance but in fact a chip off the same granite block. For the moment, there was no sign of quarreling among the pallbearers. While the new regime dug in, the rest of the world might get a breathing spell, But the death of Stalin itself did not change any fact of geography, economics or ambition; it did not destroy a single Soviet regiment nor ground a single MIG, nor stop a single...
Seated a few yards from him, the visitor does not notice the marks of strain-the extended eyelids, the twitching right eye, the flaccid skin-but sees only the hard, skeptical eyes, the restless energy of the small frame. Rhee is the last of the old heroes of the Korean struggle for independence, a man with long memories. Just outside Seoul lie the ruins of Westgate prison, where the Emperor Koh-Jong's jailers spliced Rhee's fingers between wooden wands which the jailers twisted until his fingers were almost ripped from the joints; there he was imprisoned...
Arthur (Death of a Salesman) Miller's Enemy is a shortened, sharpened, slanged-up version, with some new blood replacing the old, flaccid, translator's English. And Fredric March plays Stockmann with helpful vigor. But Miller has given the play a more agitated but less striking face. His version is not so much bitter satire as topical melodrama (with some of the new blood smeared on the characters' foreheads). It is not so much an affirmation of minority rightness as a plea for minority rights; it suggests a man persecuted less for telling the unpalatable truth than...