Word: patches
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...LOCKWOOD CONCERN, by John O'Hara. The "concern" is that of the tough, grasping Lockwoods of eastern Pennsylvania, who want to turn themselves into gentlemen but don't want to give up the morals of the coal patch. The period detail is meticulous, but the book as a whole, like most of the author's long novels, will be useful principally to the reader who wants to commit O'Hara-kiri...
...Patch of Blue takes some getting used to. It starts as a pointless little tearjerker, then turns abruptly into contemporary hope opera. To save it from itself requires extraordinary skill, and the movie is fortunate in having miracle workers at hand...
...Patch of Blue flirts openly with the issue of interracial love, only to leave it unresolved in the last reel, and the film's message becomes almost immaterial. In their quiet, tender scenes together, Hartman and Poitier conquer the insipidity of a plot that reduces tangled human problems to a case of the black leading the blind...
...cloud of smoke went up, and then a roar, a screaming, enormous roar that no TV microphone could ever reproduce. It left the pad, and seemed to hover above it for a few seconds. The crowd applauded. Then it was off, streaking across the sky into an open patch between the clouds, faster than you could believe, faster than the screaming jets that followed it, faster than the cameras can suggest. In less than two minutes, it was out of sight...
...sureness of his observations and the permanence of his subjects' uncommitment--what remedy does he prescribe? He urges the unleashing of the utopian impulse. "What is needed is to free that impulse once again, to redirect it toward the creation of a better society. We too often attempt to patch up our threadbare values and outworn purposes; we too rarely dare imagine a society radically different from our own." This moralism has become a commonplace in recent political thought, as has the demonstration that it is unlikely to occur. It is as fatuous to exhort intellectuals to think in utopian...