Word: gresham
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...variety shows-animal acts, jugglers, monologu-ists-are dogged reminders that vaudeville is as dead as the day before yesterday. The old troupers are legend now, larger than life in sentimental memories. But the best of them never needed such exaggeration. Carnival Buff William (Nightmare Alley) Gresham's biography, Houdini, The Man Who Walked Through Walls (Holt; $4.50), serves its subject well, simply by telling the story straight. "As the archetype of the hero who could not be fettered or confined," writes Biographer Gresham, "he became the idol of a million boys, a friend of presidents and the entertainer...
...achieving'"this," the dark, sturdy escapist made more than a living. He made himself into an expert swimmer, a master lockpicker, a pioneer aviator, a psychic investigator, and an unfailing expert in the arrogant art of obtaining personal publicity. His greatest illusions and escapes, explains Author Gresham as he gives away the master's secrets, were constructed with the simplicity that is the essence of true genius. They were part fraud and part finely honed athletic skill. Example: When he dived manacled and chained into an icy river, he swam free tense moments later, because the chains were...
...give him a beating. At the trial of the police chief (on a charge of soliciting a person to commit a felony), Brother Richard Kellam handled the defense. The Kellam-backed commonwealth's attorney did not allow Dunn to take the stand, and Kellam-supported Police Justice Eugene Gresham did not permit Dunn's lawyer to address the court. The chief was acquitted...
...regime. To a six-month volunteer stint in 1956 as an active reserve officer in Algeria, he brought a young man's sharp nose for injustice and strong palate for raw truths. By his evidence, the Algerian fiasco seems to have entered the phase where a kind of Gresham's law of superheated nationalism applies-the fanatics drive out the moderates...
...stories of a little town in the Deep South. If the clowns are there, blowing up bladders in the wings and trading anecdotes with the witches, it is because his theater resembles Macbeth's and Shakespeare's. Another Elizabethan, Thomas ("Bad money drives out good'') Gresham. seems to have suggested a text for Faulkner's moral law: Bad men drive out good...