Word: imperfectibility
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...PAST IMPERFECT-Ilka Chase-Doubleday, Doran...
...best-selling books in the U.S. last fortnight was Radio Actress Ilka Chase's Past Imperfect. Word had gone forth that this hodgepodge personal history is as broad as it is high, and generously peppered with peephole patter about everybody from the late William Alexander Percy (Lanterns on the Levee) to café society's Lady Mendl and Hollywood's George Cukor...
...Flint, Mich., a Polish girl carefully fastens the bolt of a .50-caliber machine gun in a grinder, adjusts a machine which smoothes its face. In a noisy Detroit cellar-school a mother of three works with a hand riveter -inserting rivets, inspecting them, and drilling them out if imperfect. And thousands of girls all over the U.S. are making small parts on machines, inspecting, filling shells, putting fabric on non-stress areas of bomber wings, bending tubing to fit into fuselages, making rubber boats, assembling machine guns and small arms. They work as long as ten hours...
...book of reminiscences, Past Imperfect (Doubleday, Doran; $3), broadcasting Actress Ilka Chase cut loose from the Nice Nellyism required by radio, let her pen run on without inhibitions. Sample (of her youthful meeting with Novelist George Moore): "Moore was a spindly-legged, pot-bellied, bejowled little man, and he unexpectedly pinched my behind. I felt rather honored that my behind should have drawn the attention of the great master of English prose...
...wartime public sentiment can be stirred and public thinking informed only by something unfavorably known as "propaganda," the program was propaganda. Yet its theatrics, its sentimentality, its moments of bad taste were not products of war but of imperfect art. It did not descend to cheap and spurious jingoism. And it told a truth in telling, out of the mouths of the imagined People, why and when the Bill of Rights was written, what it says, and what it means as an American Charter promising no deprivation of life or property except by due process of law-a conception notably...