Word: paassen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
THAT DAY ALONE-Pierre van Paassen -Dial...
...filthy and polluted! What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces and grind the faces of the poor?" For this descendant of many Dutch Calvinist divines is something of a modern Zachariah, a minor social prophet in the line of Tolstoy, Strindberg, Shaw and Ibsen. Pierre van Paassen knows how to number the sins and sound the trump of doom so mellifluously that his first book, Days of Our Years, sold 300,000 copies. Advance sales of That Day Alone last week reached...
...social discernments, tremulous with human pity, and, like the works of many social seers, somewhat rambling. It includes: 1) Farewell to France, possibly the most subduedly ominous of the many firsthand reports of France on the eve of the debacle; 2) As Time One Day . . ., a resumption of van Paassen's boyhood memories about the Dutch village of Gorcum, begun in Days of Our Years; 3) The New Order Comes to Gorcum, a vivid account of the coming of the Nazis; 4) In the Steps of the Sun, eleven true stories illustrating the general misery...
...readers who are proof against van Paassen's great lay sermons, his descriptions of collapsing France may well be the most exciting parts of his book. Van Paassen wandered in wartime Paris like a man in a city of tombs. He watched the mobile guards leave for the front: "Not a smile . . . not once a cheer." "C'est bien morne," said van Paassen aloud. "Non, monsieur" a Frenchman corrected him, "it is sinister...
...What panic?" asked van Paassen...