Word: kov
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...NINETY AND NINE (343 pp.)-Imre Kovács-Funk & Wagnal/s...
This novel burns a hole in the Iron Curtain with a moral blowtorch. A white-hot account of the Red tyranny in Hungary, The Ninety and Nine is fired less by skilled prose than searing passion, less by action than ideas. Hungarian-born Author Kovács, a World War II underground fighter and onetime secretary-general of Hungary's National Peasant Party, now works for the Free Europe Committee in New York. Lacking the theoretical brilliance of a Koestler, he nonetheless brings to his grade B Darkness at Noon a fingertip knowledge of the Communist mind in action...
...last pious rite to the party, Father Janos to save his friends and fellow priests from further torture. But before he mounts the gallows, Rab, feeling "an absolute void within me,"' kneels before Father Janos and asks "to die in the peace of faith." Author Kovács sometimes mashes a thumb with his literary chisel, but when he hits the historic mark, the apocalyptic tableau of hammer and sickle v. the cross stands out in bold, fresh relief...
...Zhukov trapped as many as ten German divisions this way. He would then stand off and pound them to pieces with his artillery. Writes German General Guderian: "Whenever the German army fell into a dangerous, disorganized or shilly-shally state, we always looked for the skillful hand of . . . Zhu-kov." Eisenhower once asked Zhukov how his men negotiated minefields. Zhukov's answer chilled Ike: "When we come to a minefield, our infantry attacks as if it were not there. The losses we get from personnel mines we consider equal to those we would have gotten from machine guns...