Word: mercilessly
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...Difference. Though the Russians boast loudly of providing education for all. their school system is not as democratic as it sounds. The regular ten-year elementary and secondary program is merciless: in 1954. less than 126 out of every 1,000 pupils who had started it managed to survive for graduation. But the big difference between U.S. and Soviet education is a matter of emphasis. Foreign languages and geography get far more attention in the U.S.S.R., and 41% of the entire upper-grade curriculum is devoted to mathematics and science. This, says Expert DeWitt, is a "distinctive feature of Soviet...
...Dumb to Know. In whatever he did, Bernard DeVoto was tributary to nothing. He was father confessor to scores of Harvard students who, he thought, had a sincere desire to be writers. But when it came to sham-either academic or political-he could be merciless. Occasionally, his reputation for sounding off on everything, whether big or small, tended to becloud his reputation as a serious scholar...
...Merciless Creature. Joseph Wood Krutch would let even the mountain lions and the rattlesnakes keep their own skins. In The Voice of the Desert there is only one creature he mercilessly skins alive-man, the destroyer of nature and of the natural balance. "To almost everything except man," he writes, "the sight of man [is] the most terrifying of all sights...
Wesley Shrader looks at the ministry from a different perspective: he is pastor of the First Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va. His slim book, Dear Charles (Macmillan; $2.50), is a light but merciless exposé of the rituals of tinkling cymbalism. It is more disturbing than Gantry because it could easily pass as the handbook of many a modern clergyman...
...Much of the writing was pretty good, particularly when the father was teaching his son the first principles of meanness: "Nice guys don't win ball games . . . The road to failure is paved with kind hearts . . . The good die young . . . You've got to be mean, merciless and mercenary to get ahead in the world." Unfortunately, the director and the actors botched the farce by trying to play it realistically...