Word: one
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now, When My Baby Smiles at Me) which at best gives them the pleasant frenzy of a circus calliope. But this one seems to take all the wrong paths. Even the Technicolor scenes are draped with heavy shadows that obscure the more interesting characters. The best that can be said of the show is that Gale Robbins and June Haver, both pleasant to look at, do some nice singing and dancing, whenever they get the chance...
...one of Manhattan's biggest bookshops, a salesman gestured cynically toward his Christmas customers. "Give them a fat historical novel and they'll trample every good book in the place to get to it." It was a familiar moan in the book business-even when the moaner had to raise his voice to be heard above his booming cash register. Yet as a summary for 1949 the judgment was too jaundiced. It was true that popular puddings were as plentiful as usual, with old practitioners like Frank Yerby, Marguerite Steen and F. van Wyck Mason tirelessly serving them...
...year drew toward its close, a wacky picture book, White Collar Zoo, stood at the head of the non-fiction bestsellers, and a vastly overrated picaresque novel with a panoramic ancient setting, The Egyptian, ruled the current fiction roost. One was a good-natured freak, the other an escape hatch, and neither of them was a suggestive commentary on the year's literary inventory...
...choice and a bestseller, it was a happy combination of urgent theme and ideal writer that found adequate recognition. The Literary Guild also reached abroad, in a departure from its routine menu, to give its 900,000 members Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day. Long considered one of the world's fine stylists, Miss Bowen was at her best in this study of tenuous human relationships in wartime Britain. To Be a Pilgrim, Joyce Gary's fourth novel to be published in the U.S., was a knowing, good-humored look at 20th Century British manners...
...Volume V (Guadalcanal) of Harvard Professor Samuel Eliot Morison's massive history of the Navy in World War II. What war at sea meant for the Germans was compactly set down in Anthony Martienssen's Hitler and His Admirals, written from captured Nazi records. One book seemed certain to become a minor classic of its kind: British Captain Russell Grenfell's The Bismarck Episode, a terse description of the pursuit and destruction of the mighty German battleship in the greatest sea hunt in naval history. Of the books of personal war experiences, two were outstanding: Norwegian...