Word: inventing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...history of this recurrent American dream is unrolled with an unerring sense for drawing every last bit of humor from the situation. There are a few sub-happenings, like Blandings' professional struggle--he has to invent a new slogan for Wham Ham, Inc. There is also his wife's old but incipient romance with their old lawyer friend Bill Cole. But most of the action plods around the single spectre of Blandings getting fleeced...
Author Kirst's picture of barracks life is only mildly caricature: he knows that the everyday facts are so close to comedy that there is no need to invent the ludi crous. Above all-almost for the first time since Hitler's rise, when the shadow of horror fell on all writing by and about Germans-this book makes at least one group of Germans seem truly human and amusing. For whatever else they were, Gunner Asch suggests the Wehrmacht soldiers were also members in the brother hood of the gripe, card-carriers in the great privates...
When the non-Russian recruit enters the world of Conrad's professor, he is bound about with rules which at first seem incredibly naive. The details of conspiratsia involve the dimmest kind of drudgery. No thriller writer would condescend to invent a scene as clumsily conceived as the actual meeting of two spies in a Geneva street. One of them thus summarized his instructions from Moscow: "I was to be wearing a white scarf and to be holding in my right hand a leather belt. As the clock struck noon, I would be approached by a woman . . . holding...
...before you despair of the blundering guesswork your girl hunt must involve, remember that it was a hunch that made Edison invent the incandescent light. It was a hunch that made Napoleon march on Moscow. (If you want to know how the 100,000 who walked back to France felt, try walking down Garden Street at 1:10 some winter night after an unsuccessful date...
...story. In his column, he wrote: " 'Twas in the old days the flying boats were landing at Foynes-about '38 I should say; the passengers would come in by launch, shivering and shaking fit to die with cold. 'Surely,' said Joe Sheridan, 'we must invent a stirrup cup for the poor souls, and them not able to put their shivering hands in their pockets for a shilling to pay unless we warm them. What is more warming,' said Joe, 'than Irish whisky, smooth as a maiden's kiss? To take the chill...