Word: gin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Anyone who has suffered the pain and humiliation of having his ARETE cut from under him by a well-aimed charge of unresolved DICHOTOMY thrown in by a character loaded with gin and HUBRIS at a literary cocktail party ought to buy this splendidly written dictionary. Without being exactly a manual for the uncertain intellectual, it does live up to its blurb ("not only useful but enjoyable"). If a great many of the hundreds of terms seem Greek to the reader, the reason is that a great many of them are, for the Greeks were first in the study...
Many of his monologues are autobiographical "confessions." During Prohibition, on Chicago's West Side, he recalls tearfully, his Russian-born grandmother made bathtub gin to support the family, and one of Sheldon Berman's first memories is of being held by his mother (now dead) in a tight clutch of terror while police raided their home. His father Nathan was a tavern owner, and he appears, in one of Berman's best routines, as a militantly bourgeois delicatessen keeper who rough-talkingly tenders a chunk of his life savings so that his son can go to acting...
...Stay Well, for which Mrs. Keys supplied 200 tasty recipes. The Keyses do not eat "carving meat" - steaks, chops, roasts - more than three times a week, and a single entree normally is not repeated more than once every three weeks. For cocktails they have martinis or negronis (¼ gin, ¼ Campari bitters, ¼ sweet or dry vermouth, ¼ soda water, over ice in an old-fashioned glass). The typical Keys dinner contains 1,000 calories, only 20% of which come from fats of any kind, 5% from saturated fats. A sample menu: pasta al brodo (turkey broth with noodles), veal...
...watch fob; the horse thief who won Bill's admiration by running 18 miles barefoot through snow and prickly pear; the U.S. Cavalry troop with which Bill rode and whose main commissary item was a five-gallon demijohn of whisky and Old Tom Cat gin; the Indian called Young Man Afraid of His Horses. There are the fascinating photographs and lithos, including one of Buffalo Bill with 10 correspondents covering the Indian wars-the war correspondents wearing their own scalps and, in the tradition of their calling, looking far more bellicose than Combatant Cody...
...Gin & Mimbo. Durrell seems to lend his animals the qualities of far-out British eccentrics. There was the egg-eating snake which absorbed the yolk and white, regurgitated the crushed shell. There was Bug-Eyes, the needle-clawed female lemur, who daintily dabbed at her petal-thin ears with a drop of her own water as if applying perfume. But the most colorful character in the book is not an animal but the Fon of Bafut, a royal hedonist with a joyous appetite for women, dance, song and drink, in the form of tumblers of Scotch, gin and mimbo...