Word: matter-of-fact
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Tolstoy saw men and battles as unwitting pawns used in an inscrutable game played by history. Modest and matter-of-fact reporter Salisbury does not permit himself the luxury of such speculative indulgences. If he sees a shaping force in the tragedy of Leningrad, beyond Hitler's madness, it lies in the villainy and vanity of Joseph Stalin. For the Soviet dictator not only misjudged the course of events in 1941 and refused to arm his country adequately, he systematically falsified history and brutally suppressed the truth afterward to hide his own foolishness. Thousands of men associated with...
...Soviet diplomats were evacuated as Red Guards spat on them at the Peking airport and made them crawl under portraits of Mao Tse-tung; now these Soviet citizens are returning. A recent complaint to India over an attack on the Chinese embassy in New Delhi was stern but matter-of-fact, and there was no counter-demonstration in Peking-in stark contrast to 1967, when at least twelve foreign embassies were besieged by Red Guards at one time or another. There is also evidence that overseas Chinese communities, most notably in Hong Kong and in Burma, have been quietly told...
...LORD, I WISH I WAS A BUZZARD, by Polly Greenberg (Macmillan; $4.50). This matter-of-fact rendering of a day in the cotton fields is somewhat removed from the modern child's experiences. The illustrations in brown and orange by Aliki catch the polka-dot bleakness of the Southern landscape at cotton-picking time...
LYNDON JOHNSON'S fifth and final Thanksgiving Proclamation was not the conventional catalogue of national self-congratulation. How could it be, after the sort of year the nation-and the world-has experienced? Flat and matter-of-fact, it fell far short of eloquence. Yet in tone and temper, it probably came close to expressing the mood of Americans in a year many of them would rather forget...
...courses, he also subscribes to publications as diverse as National Review and the Peking Review. He is obviously intelligent, and his prose, though sometimes wooden, is sturdy. What his brief suffers from most is-as he himself says-the fact that "I am by nature a transcendentally unemotional, matter-of-fact individual, the antithesis of what a man testifying in his own behalf, with his life at stake, should...