Word: humorlessness
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...wealthy landowner, he early learned to sit a horse and boss his father's peons. The landowning politicians of Chile's 19th century- Conservatives who disputed for power with equally conservative Liberals- molded his beliefs to the right. The Chilean cavalry gave him a passion for humorless order; Chileans say that once, for reasons of pure esthetic tidiness, he made a tall clarinetist in a military band trade instruments with a short trombonist...
...Crown into a lasting winter of discontent? Can the couple's 13-year-old son Tony grow into a healthy, normal American boy after he peeps through the cottage blinds and sees his mother in the arms and bed of his 20-year-old counselor-companion Jeff? Is humorless, self-contained Oliver to blame for it all be cause he treats his Hartford, Conn, printing plant as a religion and his wife as a hobby? For the answers to these and many other related questions, tune in to Lucy Crown, a bit of fictional hokey-pokey in 21 chapters...
...thinning grey hair is worn at ordinary, not Claghorn, length, and he shuns the string tie and the diamond stickpin. Taciturn and humorless, he has neither the gift nor the inclination for the vivid rhetorical attacks on opponents that were the stock in trade of such old masters as South Carolina's Ben Tillman, who won the voters' hearts by announcing his determination to go to Washington and plunge a pitchfork into the rump of President Grover Cleveland. Where Theodore ("The Man") Bilbo embarrassed respectable Southerners with personal peccadilloes, ranging from a particularly messy divorce to brazen bribe...
...impressions into one of his novelistic moral conundrums. The attempt of the U.S. to find what he calls a "Third Force" between French colonialism and military Communism, is personified in Alden Pyle, member of a U.S. economic mission. He is the "quiet American"-a Harvard man, young, innocent, good, humorless, a Unitarian. He speaks in the hortatory Emily Post style which all British novelists since Max Beerbohm seem to think is the native speech of proper Bostonians. He eats "Vit-Health" sandwich-spread that his mother sends him. He is courageous and dedicated, but his eager virtue turns into fumbling...
...reading is humorless and the music is indifferent, but cat lovers are lapping...