Word: frontally
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...only trouble is, he has not written it. It remains only a lucid diagram. Summer and Smoke has moments of sad, sharp insight, but little coherence and intensity as a whole. The reason is partly structural. In none of his plays has Tennessee Williams made a classic frontal assault on drama. Writing episodically, with tricks of stagecraft and a crutchlike use of offstage music, he has always trusted to a vague sense of poetry and a vivid sense of theater to pull him through. Here the sense of theater is weakened by wordiness and the episodic method is inadequate...
...Servant's Role. When Franklin Roosevelt made his frontal assault on the "nine old men," Hughes reacted, in public at least, with Jovian calm. But he quietly and effectively fought F.D.R.'s effort to pack the court. When Roosevelt stood before him to be sworn in for a precedent-breaking third term, Hughes whispered through his beard: "Franklin, isn't this becoming a trifle monotonous?" A few months later, at 79, he resigned as Chief Justice and retired to a quiet life of quiet honors...
Then the Atomic Energy Commission (which took over from Manhattan District) yanked the foundation from under the Daniels pile. Practical work on a $10-20 million power plant was premature, it said. The wise course was to abandon a frontal assault on the problem and switch to a low-priority program of cautious, long-range experimentation...
Brain surgery is a tempting way to tackle insanity. When it works, the results are quick and dramatic. Recently surgeons have been concentrating on the front part of the brain, isolating the frontal lobe from the rest of the brain (prefrontal lobotomy), or cutting part of it out (topectomy). Trying a new approach, Vienna-born Neurologist Ernest A. Spiegel and Brain Surgeon Henry T. Wycis, both of Philadelphia's Temple University, decided to work on the thalamus, at the base of the brain...
...thalamus, a sort of relay station, transmits nerve impulses to & from the frontal lobe. When these nerve pathways get out of whack, the doctors reasoned, emotional control becomes disturbed and insanity results. Why not operate on the thalamus direct instead of risking damage to the frontal lobe? The big difficulty was getting at the thalamus without wrecking three inches of brain...