Word: gimcracks
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...first time in decades, Mormon bishops went around warning backsliders in their flocks-i.e., Tribune subscribers-to change their ways. The Deseret News invaded the Sunday field, which until then had been a Tribune monopoly. Going desperately after circulation, the Deseret News pushed steak knives and other gimcrack prizes on would-be subscribers. The Tribune fought back with its own prize contests, but could not afford the competition. The Deseret News moved out front...
...Mazzini's liberal vision turned into the gimcrack grandiosity of Mussolini's Italy is a story that gives historical dimension to this biography. Modern Italy, in Author Rhodes's view, is largely the work of two poets-Dante.'with his "conception of a revised Roman Empire which lay dormant in the Italian mind for nearly 600 years." and D'Annunzio. who grafted onto this conception a set of Machiavellian politics and alien Nietzschean notions of a Mediterranean superman...
...picketing for Sacco and Vanzetti, make protest resonant. There was something of a distaff Byron, about her, and on the stage of the '20s she was one kind of romantic lead as Scott Fitzgerald was another. Gallant, windblown, untidy, she was at once genuine and a little gimcrack, gifted and over-facile, bohemian and childishly boastful about how her candle burned at both ends...
...return and rediscovery of his "adopted homeland." A Buddhist scroll hanging in a friend's house provides Author Maraini with one of his key themes: "Free yourself from attachment to useless things." The Japanese mind is obsessed with the transience of things, which may help to explain both gimcrack exports and the scroll paintings of ukiyo-e ("the floating world") of the theater and the geisha. This wars with the principle of permanence reflected in the Shinto worship of nation and ancestor. Innovations change the Japanese scene without changing the Japanese...
...unlikely gimcrack that for years has been the hottest-selling art object in Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost big island, is the small plaster bust (price: $1) of a stern-faced New England schoolmaster who died in 1887. William Smith Clark stayed only eight months on Hokkaido, but the visit, in 1876, was long enough for him to be enshrined by the islanders as something between seer and saint. On leave from his job as president of Massachusetts Agricultural College (now the University of Massachusetts), Clark helped found the school that was to become the outpost island's pride...