Word: persistent
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Since Adolf Hitler, an outpouring of writing has tried to explain the violence that human beings do to one another. Nagging questions persist: Why did so many acquiesce in Hitler's evil? Why did so many Jews go quietly to their deaths when they had a good chance of resisting? Fiction, rather than scholarship, has supplied the shrewder answers. Perhaps the profoundest explanation to date comes from the pen of a Jewish writer driven from Germany in 1936 and now living in Holland. Hans Keilson's novel subtly and eloquently probes the ambivalent relation of victim with aggressor...
...market has quivered, waiting for the U.S. to say when and how it would sell so large an amount of tin, and for what price. Despite State Department denials, rumors persist in London (where world price patterns are set) that the U.S. intends to dump its stocks at rock-bottom prices to help out the U.S. steelmakers, who are the prime users of tin (for cans). Equally persistent are contrary rumors that the U.S. will set a high price because it paid relatively high prices for the stockpiled tin and does not want to lose money. The U.S. has another...
...CONGO, Leopoldville (Bel.) Pop.: 17,000,000. Size: 905,000 sq. mi. Literacy: 20%. School attendance: 50%. College graduates: 35. Christians: Nominal 47%. In interior, population is almost totally illiterate; sorcery, ritual killings, tribal warfare persist. Less than 10% are serious Christians; 504 priests, 121 nongraduate doctors serve one of Africa's biggest populations...
...rich in passing fancies, all it takes to plan a literary revolt is three disappointed writers and a sidewalk cafe. Most such uprisings are dissipated after the second apéritif, leaving nothing behind but the smile on the face of the waiter. Yet literary groups-if they persist long enough to draw serious attention-are occasionally to be reckoned with. Between about 1880 and 1895, for instance, the Symbolists, led by Mallarmé, reshaped the tone and temper of poetry, both English and French. In more recent times the Existentialists, though they produced no technical inventions, succeeded in making...
Novelists who persist, in a secular age, in chronicling man's war and peace with God are quite likely to be artists, or at least men whose obsessions speak with the force of art; the hacks are more likely to follow the fashion, which is to whimper at Meaninglessness. The late Nikos Kazantzakis (The Last Temptation of Christ; St. Francis) was such a God-obsessed artist, and so, in a slighter and less intense way, is Isaac Singer, 57, a Pole (now a U.S. citizen) who lives in Manhattan and writes in Yiddish. His subjects are usually lowly Polish...