Word: hissing
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COLD FRIDAY, by Whittaker Chambers. A reflective book of essays written after the stormy Hiss trials. Included are a vivid picture of intellectual ferment at Columbia in the early '30s, studies on Communism, and warm, charming pastorals inspired by life at the author's Maryland farm where most of the book was written...
Whittaker Chambers spent his life searching for final answers. Spurred by "the need for truth" and "the fear of error," his search carried him into what Albert Camus called "those waterless deserts where thought reaches its confines." After the glaring publicity of the Alger Hiss trial and the 1952 publication of his own confessional autobiography Witness, Chambers withdrew to the seclusion of his Maryland farm. Often his first waking thought was, "Must I live through another day?" This posthumous book, made up of diary excerpts, letters, extended reflections on himself and his time, is the fruit of those years. Edited...
...American Way of Life is fast becoming one big sssssssssss. The ubiquitous hiss comes from the vast, ever-expanding array of aerosol cans that has brought the pushbutton age to everyday living. There are already more than 300 products available in aerosol cans, and their uses range from the routine to the recondite; they perfume rooms, freshen mattresses, renew golf balls, stiffen petticoats, bandage wounds, de-ice windshields, inflate flat tires, wax furniture, varnish oil paintings, scare off snakes and ward off pregnancies...
...away, tiny rockets called microjets are now being tried. No bigger than bullets, they are filled with a quick-burning propellant and launched in quick succession from a thin-walled, hand-held tube. Their chief advantages are light weight and silence. They operate not with a bang but a hiss...
Jack Gelber's first play, The Connection, was set half a league to hellward of the boundary where bohemianism shades into crime and insanity. Its heroes were heroin addicts, its dialogue had the tape-recorder hiss of genuine desperation, and the result was a 32-month run off-Broadway. Gelber's first novel seemingly starts off to make that same scene. Marijuana smoke curls up from the pages; the characters are mostly Greenwich Village idiots. But though the chief idiot, Manny Fells, has lowered himself by his own bootstraps into the right kind of roach-ridden Manhattan loft...