Word: humanity
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Greene's view, conditions do not improve as man grows up. As the most famous of the trio of British literary converts (the others: Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark), Greene is a Catholic of Augustinian severity, more conscious of evil than of grace. "Human nature," he asserts, here as in his novels, "is not black and white but black and grey...
...logic he puts down Somerset Maugham, not for slickness but for lacking a religious sense. Maugham, he writes, is an agnostic "forced to minimize-pain, vice, the importance of his fellowmen. He cannot believe in a God who punishes and he cannot therefore believe in the importance of a human action." Like Greene himself, Maugham often explored the old British theme of the Imperial dropout, the white-man-going-to-hell-in-the-tropics. But Maugham's doomed colonials could not go to hell-they could only go to the dogs...
...determined to make it big as a popular singer any way she can. She succeeds. What is more extraordinary, so does Renek, somehow using a sentimental and unpromising plot to explore the nature of power, the exploitation of sex and some of the redeeming qualities of the human spirit...
Eventually, Siam succeeds in denying the analyst's hypothesis by not becoming deformed, and her courage makes her a memorable heroine. Unflinchingly viewing the psychology behind the glamor industry's power plays without seeming to drown in the uglier aspects of human behavior, interlacing his pathos with satiric toughness, Author Renek proves that you can write a nuanced novel in the harsh shadow cast by formularized fiction...
Hillaby is a traveler and science writer. Apart from his legs, his greatest strength lies in a command of natural science and history, and a dry, witty style. He blends sharp observation of topography, birds and beasts with an unusual feeling for the ancient human chronicle of a land inhabited for thousands of years. On a vast British army artillery range in Redesdale, for instance, he pointed out to a brigadier that Romans had operated large catapults in exactly the same spot 1,600 years earlier...