Word: likes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Baptist layman, I would humbly like to take issue with the Rev. Bliss Wiant. He opposes the singing of gospel hymns in churches [Aug. 31]. These old hymns have been a source of hope and consolation to millions of people throughout the world; they promise help to those who are faithful, honest, and prayerful...
Porgy and Bess. George Gershwin would spin like a top at the heavy, wide-screen pageant that Producer Sam Goldwyn has fashioned from his folk opera, but nothing can stop the tingle of Gershwin's wonderful songs...
...Parmelee Cove, the elegant estate still ruled by Reese's dotty grandmother, everyone knows the forms by heart. Schools, colleges, clothes, jobs and "marriage partners" all fit an ingrained pattern, and most of the Parmelee grandchildren, clustered with their families around the central money pile, like the arrangement well enough. Reese's wife Esther, who grew up knowing the smell but not the taste of money, venerates the forms as if they were sacraments. To be well bred is to be ill bedded, she thinks, and so she is frigid. But when Reese undertakes a Long Island fling...
Novelist Auchincloss, who has written this sort of book before (The Great World and Timothy Colt, Venus in Sparta), knows his forms and his upper-crust Long Islanders. His description of Esther and the other Parmelee Cove women pursuing the adulterers like a chorus of Eumenides has the rasp of accurate reporting. But if Reese's predicament is real, he himself is sometimes the sort of hero scissored by children from the backs of cereal boxes. His incessant wrestling with the devil is a little sophomoric, and his escape from Parmelee Cove shows the limits of even the best...
Author Myrivilis allows for more sentimentality than most; yet it does not cloy. The reason is quite simple: that is how things are. Smaragthi remains consistent to the end, unmarried, herself a sort of mermaid Madonna who rolls naked in the sea like a porpoise but shrinks with revulsion from a man's touch. The fishermen soak up the local booze, beat their wives, and listen with awe to the tavernkeeper's yarns about the wonders of America, where he made his pile. An ancient crone tells wondrous fairy tales. A pathetic schoolmaster dreams of the great...