Word: ironist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Davidson spent many months interviewing her old classmates Susie and Tasha. She is often an acute observer and ironist. When the radicals Susie and Jeff decided to get married, the bride's mother, Mrs. Hersh negotiated the affair upward until it became a reception for 200 at the Beverly Hills Hotel. On her wedding night, Susie suffered an ethical crisis over whether to wear a lacy nightgown her mother had packed...
...England's intellectual aristocracy. Thomas Henry Huxley, the great biologist and proselytizer of Darwin's theories of evolution, was his grandfather. Poet Matthew Arnold, the apostle of sweetness and light, was his mother's uncle. On one side, the traditions of scientific humanism; on the other, the melancholy ironist and culture critic who foreshadowed his grandnephew's own tussles with cynicism and faith. Aldous was a natural-born two-culture man at exactly the time when the wedges of agnosticism and technological specialization had just driven those cultures apart. He would probably have been a scientist like his brother Julian...
...supreme ironist. For him to have the power of the presidency reduced, at last, by a liberal drive to overturn the Administration of a hated Republican President merely shows what life's possibilities are. Having Nixon replaced by Ford may turn out to be the maraschino cherry on the sundae in terms of irony. Ford may become far more conservative and far more popular than Nixon...
...that only vaguely understand, cut off by their work and upbringing from what their wives must feel, they fall back on a meshing of school dictums and artifacts, and, if possible, love. These fail to make life coherent, but they do help make it bearable. Cheever is a master ironist, and always filters wit through his pain...
After 1945 Böll worked as an assistant cabinetmaker but quit as soon as his first stories were published. A realist and an ironist, his prose is terse and direct, his manner as reticent and unflamboyant as Grass's is slashing and spectacular. The despair of war and its appalling hardship run through all his early work. For Böll, West Germany's postwar economic boom drowned out the moral voice of his country's guilty conscience. In 1959 he published Billiards at Half-Past Nine, a family chronicle in which the founding father...