Word: humorless
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Keitel's memoirs, written at Nürnberg during his trial and completed just before his execution, reveal a mind that was both humorless and unimaginative; he did, however, have a vast capacity for administrative drudgery-and all were qualities that Hitler recognized as essentials in a subordinate if his own plans were to work. Keitel not only carried out the Führer's orders with diligence, but did not even permit himself-much less his own subordinates-to question their morality. The infamous Nacht und Nebel order of 1941, under which Resistance suspects from France...
...role of recent years, James Stewart plays the stubborn, not-very-bright bush pilot, a "back number" who demonstrates leadership by guarding the water rations. "Little men with slide rules and computers are going to inherit the earth," he grumbles. His adversary is a German, Hardy Kruger, a small humorless cipher whose knowledge of aerodynamics puts everyone's fate in his hands, and well he knows it. Richard Attenborough is flawless as a stuttering, alcoholic navigator, rivaled by Ian Bannen as a bore abristle with saving wit, and Peter Finch as an officer whose code of honor consists mostly...
...Goldmund, Glasperlenspiel) that followed it. In them all Hesse writes with the subtle and mocking simplicity of an oracle; almost every sentence must be sifted for double or triple meanings. And he never condescends to the little tricks of storytelling that make reading easy. He is totally, Germanically humorless, and time and again displays the absurdity of the selfabsorbed: when he tries to be serious about life, he often manages merely to be earnest about himself. Yet at his best Hesse writes with diamantine clarity-not about the psychological self in current fashion, but about the metaphysical self of traditional...
...voice that heroines are not often virgins heroes are not usually gentlemen. He did not necessarily punish the wicked. Indeed, in Dreiser's novels good and evil do not exist-there is only unheroic suffering and scrambling for success. In retrospect, his prose seems clotted, clumsy, pompous, prolix, humorless, flatulent and dull. An American Tragedy ran to 385,000 words ("250,000 of them unnecessary," snorted Mencken). Nevertheless, Dreiser's dogged honesty and ruthless candor opened the way for all the social realists of the '30s (many drearier than Dreiser) and also, in a way, for Hemingway...
...More devils can be routed by a little laughter than by a carload of humorless piety," writes Methodist Pastor Charles Merrill Smith in How to Be come a Bishop Without Being Religious (Doubleday; $3.50). The devils that Smith wants to exorcise are the phony pietism and the trivial hypocrisy that many a Protestant pastor has to indulge in if he intends to climb the hierarchical ladder of his church...