Word: ott
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Died. Mel Ott, 49, member of baseball's Hall of Fame, longtime (1926-47) slugging outfielder for the New York Giants who also managed the team during his last six seasons, spent recent summers broadcasting Detroit Tiger games; of injuries resulting from an auto crash; in New Orleans. Ott made Manager John McGraw's team when he was 16. Casey Stengel, then manager of the Toledo Mud Hens, asked for the boy, but irascible John McGraw snarled: "Neither you nor any other minor-league manager is going to ruin that kid. He stays with me." Stay...
...sensations when he is drunk, or in rut, or in pain-little of his thoughts. He is brave; some of the others are cowardly, but courage and the lack of it do not matter; nor does brutality or kindness. The meaninglessness of war swallows everything. West German Novelist Ott is writing about men engulfed by the dark millennium Yeats foretold when "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
Horrifying Anonymity. With plodding determination, Novelist Ott follows a class of enlisted sailors through a tour of minesweeper duty, a session of midshipmen's school and a chilling succession of raiding cruises with the North Atlantic submarine wolf packs (Ott, 34, began the war as a minesweeper seaman, ended it as an ensign on a submarine). His style is lumpishly Teutonic, and the translator's cliches do not make it any smoother. Ott's impersonal handling of his characters, though it gives a horrifying anonymity to their cockroach deaths, also makes for interminable, dull stretches...
...crudities, Novelist Ott has made a case against war that is as powerful as anything in a recent novel. It is also a savage attack on the German people. A young intellectual rants about the complacency that allowed Hitler's rise: "We have outstanding religious leaders and brilliant philosophers; we have gifted musicians and soldiers; we have smart bankers and remarkable whoremas-ters; we have everything-except human beings." Lieut. Teichmann agrees half-heartedly with the half-truths, then changes his mind, protests that there is some meaning, at least, in fighting courageously...
...escape lungs, reach the surface and float helplessly. A flight of gulls lowers, swoops hungrily at the eyes of a comrade Teichmann is trying to save. Exhausted, finally broken by the war, Teichmann slips into madness. Hours later, rescue boats save 9 of the 20 men. Novelist Ott does not say whether Teichmann is one of them. It does not matter...