Word: hammarskjolds
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...popular image of Dag Hammarskjold has-changed more in the three years since his fatal plane crash than that of most statesmen changes in generations; and the cause is a posthumously published "spiritual diary" that he kept for thirty-six years, from the age of twenty until a few weeks before his death. Although Hammarskjold never showed this record to anyone, he decided sometime in the 1950's to leave it behind as "the only true 'profile'" of his personality...
IfMarkings isn't international law, neither is it-as one might expect-history. Auden remarks in a sympathetic foreward on the relative absence of references to politics and international relations. Hammarskjold, while writing Markings, rose from a brilliant economics student to become Secretary-General of the UN; yet he always subordinates external events to the moral doubts and problems that they engendered. Rather than describing, say, the circumstances of the Congo crisis, he prefers to reflect on the loneliness of power and the necessity of winning the right to be obeyed...
...When Hammarskjold expounds on such themes, he is at his least interesting. Doubtless what he says is true, but it is also platitudinous; surely no one reading that "there is a profound causal relationship between the height of a man's ambition and the depth of a man's fall" will thrill at the keenness of the insight. The Hammarskjold revealed by observations like this is still the conscientious public servant that we have always seen...
...concern with morality carries him into the religious realm, Hammarskjold becomes infinitely more interesting, both as a thinker and as a man, for it soon becomes clear that the former Secretary-General was a throughgoing mystic inclined toward asceticism. Although his outlook will hardly appeal to all readers, those who can accept the tenets of Hammarskjold's faith-they are not accessible to reason-will respond strongly to his observations on selflessness and love...
...Hoffenberg (3) 5. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Le Carre (5) 6. This Rough Magic, Stewart (6) 7. The Man, Wallace (7) 8. You Only Live Twice, Fleming (8) 9. Armageddon, Uris (9) 10. Last Exit to Brooklyn, Selby NONFICTION 1. Reminiscences, MacArthur (1) 2. Markings, Hammarskjold (3) 3. My Autobiography, Chaplin (2) 4. The Italians, Barzini (4) 5. The Kennedy Wit, Adler (7) 6. The Warren Commission Report (6) 7. A Tribute to John F. Kennedy, Salinger and Vanocur (5) 8. Future of Man, De Chardin 9. The Words, Sartre 10. Harlow, Shulman...