Word: humorless
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...Sierra Nevadas, persuaded Crocker, Stanford, Hopkins and Huntington (then Sacramento merchants) to back him, battled for Federal support, broke with his partners, and died in 1863, at 37, as the road he had dreamed about for years was at last being built. For Crazy Judah-"studious, industrious, resourceful, opinionated, humorless, and extraordinarily competent"-Author Lewis has great respect. The line he surveyed across the mountains, rising 7,000 feet in less than 20 miles, was the boldest feat of railroad engineering undertaken up to that time...
Contemplators of Land of the Free will probably rate it above Panic and The Fall of the City, But they will feel both worried and baffled. The bafflement they can blame on a hybrid art form that at least is earnestly ambitious, at worst is a humorless bollix. The worry they can blame on Poet MacLeish's extraordinary ability to hit topical points straight on the head with whatever instrument happens to come to hand. The conclusion they will probably draw is that Archibald MacLeish is so much of a poet that even his bad books make good points...
...deliberately tying up traffic until three freights and two passenger trains were stalled at one station. His growing sons cured him of that; he worked his way back to respectability as a brakeman on the Union Pacific, retired on his pension of one dollar a day. Humorless in its domestic episodes, woodenly written except for pages of authentic railroad talk, Railroadman is nevertheless a first-rate U. S. document, the best picture going of an old-time rank & file member of the powerful Railroad Brotherhoods...
Personally, Composer Offenbach was a Parisian among Parisians, a gay, bespectacled, cane-toting boulevardier, a wit, a capricious poseur. Musically, he was a past master of delightful superficialities. Published last week was his first adequate biography in English,* a carefully documented but humorless and solemn book by ex-Journalist Siegfried Kracauer...
Despite her humorless yen to dress her poems in proud, premature long pants, Poet Rukeyser succeeds, in The Book of the Dead, in giving a clear flash of what makes the contemporary U. S. hard for everybody to take: At Gauley Bridge, W. Va., a hill being tunneled on a hydro-electric project turned out to be 90-even 99% pure silica, of great metallurgical value. Consequences: the silica, for greater speed, profit, was mined dry; the tunnel workers developed silicosis, died like ants in a flour bin; lawyers representing the workers charged their clients some 50% of the piddling...