Word: flash
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...FLASH FOR FREEDOM! by GEORGE MacDONALD FRASER 287 pages. Knopf...
Most nonprofessional killings are impulsive-done in a flash of anger triggered by a minor insult or a quarrel over money, love or sex. Many are committed by people who, Sociologist Stuart Palmer says, "tend to be overconforming most of the time"-which may help to explain their extreme violence when their rebellious impulses finally break out. Often the killer does not intend to kill; in at least 20% of the cases, he is acting in self-defense...
...couple of G.I.s popping open beer cans with Mama-san and her whores. Through the bead curtain, a hand lobs a lump of steel. Thump and roll. "Grenade!" Soldier scoops it up, hesitates in stupid disbelief. FLASH! BLAM! So begins-and 140 minutes later, in an almost exact replay, so ends-The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. Between these two unanswerable exclamation points, Playwright David Rabe strings the lifeline of the soldier, Pavlo; then on that cord he attempts to hang what he sees as the rags of national honor, bloodied by the Viet...
Fraser is so far best known as the spoofing inventor of Henry Paget Flashman (Flashman, 1969, and Royal Flash, 1970), the compleat bounder. He thus comes to the reivers with an acute understanding of unsporting behavior. It stands him in excellent stead. After Henry VIII defeated the Scots at Solway Moss in 1542, for example, the fleeing survivors were held for ransom by their own border countrymen...
...CURRENT PRODUCTION the ending is unfortunately obscured by the way in which lights have been substituted for the storm. Obviously meteorological effects are not easily duplicated in a small-scale production, but the stop-action tableau which poses Rubek and Irene facing each other tenderly while the lights flash and die is unnecessarily ambiguous. Their only possible reunion should be clear: cold death on the great heights...