Word: humorous
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Because the 16 stories in Southways show less of Erskine Caldwell's customary satanic humor and forthright sexual symbolism, and because a number of them have appeared in such cautious magazines as the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, some readers may conclude that Caldwell is mellowing into a merely successful writer. Examined more closely, they warrant another guess. More skilful, briefer than Caldwell's last collection, Kneel to the Rising Sun (1935), they suggest that Caldwell is feeling his way toward a less stylized, less repetitious, more complex kind of writing...
...first stories are told with almost straight humor. Example: Ineligible for the football banquet because he has no girl to take, a high-school second-string player gets a miraculous date with the prettiest girl in the State. But at the banquet he ignores her completely- he just wanted a big feed...
This week, Dr. Carrel was in royal good humor. Just off the presses were two books-Methods of Tissue Culture by Raymond C. Parker-and Culture of Organs by Alexis Carrel and Charles A. Lindberghf-which formally presented to medicine the sum of Nobel Laureate Carrel's 40 years in science. More than any other man, Scientist Carrel has made it possible to study tissue and organs outside of their organisms, but alive. Just as Audubon's first scientific observations of living birds immeasurably advanced ornithology beyond the study of lifeless stuffed specimens, this new technique in physiology...
...Dutch stubbornness, and even that, he thinks, may be "Nature's compensation against his amiability." Even in tiny details he can find no dissonances in Roosevelt's harmonious blend of thought and action. "It is no accident," he declares, attesting Roosevelt's genuine sense of humor, "that this man should like scrambled eggs as a light dish, and detest the clayeyness and heaviness of bananas...
...made for Miss Hepburn, who turns in a delightful and talented performance. Cary Grant is adequate while Edward Everett Horton shoulders the burden of the comic entertainment. Despite the efforts of each member of the cast, however, the whole effect is not convincing and wavers uncertainly between seriousness and humor...