Word: heroisms
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Mother Courage, by Bertolt Brecht, is an ironic firestorm of a play, raging over the subjects of war, history, ideology, heroism, vice and virtue. Brecht robs his 17th century peasant heroine of her three children without breaking her indomitable will to survive. In the daunting title role, Anne Bancroft is not quite the protean earth mother she strives...
...still sound after four centuries: "If power without law can make laws, I do not know what subject he is in England that can be sure of his life or anything he calls his own." No king is a hero to his courtiers, not for lack of kingly heroism but because courtiers are courtiers. The Hollow Crown is deliciously spiced with the barbed candor of underlings: "King George IV had not been dead three days before everybody discovered that he was no great loss...
...Lenin turned from a peaceful student into a fiery revolutionist after the czarist police killed his brother. In detail, the authors unfold the subsequent chain of tragedies: Lenin's minority-party power grab in 1917, Stalin's further perversion of Marxist ideals. Russia's nationalistic heroism in World War II and its postwar imperialism, the chilling struggle for Kremlin power after Stalin's death, and the sharp differences among Communist countries. Adlai Stevenson praises the book for its "new insights" and "fresh, factual appraisal...
...written vignettes of peasant life during the Revolution. A band of illiterate Indians gathers to fight the government, but it hardly knows why. As the Revolution progresses, the peasants become only more bewildered; the Revolution seems an outrageous force beyond their control. Their idealism gives way to cynicism, their heroism to savagery. "The Revolution is like a hurricane," says one character. "If you're in it, you're not a man . . . You're a leaf, a dead leaf blown by the wind...
Eventually, the big naval guns in the hay decided the battle, knocking out one German emplacement after another. Heroism in the hills helped. Under heavy fire, an American sergeant maneuvered his antitank gun to the top of a ridge, demolished six tanks in half an hour. A British major given up for lost behind enemy lines reappeared with an enemy halftrack in tow, plus an 88-mm. gun and a dozen prisoners. A fiery British commando lieutenant colonel named Jack Churchill,* waving a sword in one hand, took 30 prisoners singlehanded. When an admiring if puzzled superior asked...