Word: ordeal
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Ordeal of a Communist. Marx's life was veined by the ordeal of his own poverty. With the egotism of genius, he refused to be turned "into a [bourgeois] money-making machine." He never had a regular job, and only once tried to get one; a railroad company turned him down as a clerk because of his bad handwriting. Once he reported to Engels: "I can no longer leave the house, because my clothes are in pawn." Another time he was arrested on suspicion of theft when he tried to pawn his wife's family silver (it bore...
Wrote the New York Herald Tribune's Virgil Thomson: "If Mr. Britten's work came out scarcely in English, vocally loud from beginning to end and decorated in a manner both ugly and anachronistic, it also came through the ordeal with its music still alive and its human drama still touching...
Both scholars and wide-eyed popularizers dug around in the roots of the nation's past, but when they came to write about it, rarely got off the ground. Most ambitious of the professional jobs was Allan Kevins' Ordeal of the Union, winner of the $10,000 Scribner Prize in American History, which devoted 1,183 detail-packed pages to the brief but politically stormy period 1848-56. Five more volumes are to come. Bernard De Voto's Across the Wide Missouri covered another brief period, 1833-38, dealt lovingly, almost lyrically, with the American fur trade...
...year job (Boston had thoughtfully kept his pay going while he was in prison). President Truman had commuted his 6-to-18-month sentence at the end of five months,* one month before he would have been eligible for parole. Outwardly, the only sign of Boss Curley's ordeal was a small strip of adhesive tape under his right eye, to keep him from irritating his ingrown eyelashes. His health? "I come back ten years younger," said Jim Curley...
Giant Swing. That was only the beginning of the Sky Queen's ordeal. The sight of her, tumbling and pitching "like a giant swing at Coney Island," made Captain Paul Cronk, commander of the Bibb, feel "horrified" and "sick." He had been awakened by a steward only a little before, had "found myself frozen stiff in the middle of my quarters" by the news that the plane carried 69 people...