Word: placidness
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...NEPHEW, by James Purdy. A moving and delicately controlled demonstration that even the most seemingly placid lives are sometimes tenuously suspended over the deep. An aging brother and sister discover that the nephew they had loved and raised and who died in Korea had made some dark emotional commitments beyond the old folks' understanding...
Rivers, except for the big navigable ones, are a little out of date. So dam builders in the Western states are turning them into strings of placid lakes, stocked with fish, vacationers and beer cans. Only unregenerate wildlife cranks doubt that progress is served in the interests of flood control, irrigation, electrification and the outboard motor industry. Author John Graves is no crank, and from the evidence of his book, he is something of a fatalist. When he heard that a section of the Brazos River valley in the west Texas scrub country, where he grew up, was soon...
...book's best piece is about railroading - how to set a freight car's brake and then, perilously, slip blocks of wood under the wheels; the arrogant, slow-motion skill of well-paid oldtimers in clean overalls; the trainman's contempt for the placid, nonrolling civilian world. The author's stream-of-consciousness gibberish is fairly effective as he tells of being summoned at 4:30 a.m. to catch an early run ("I wake up ... in the mouth of the night and there everything knows that I have no mother, and no sister, and no father...
...novel's end. the violent past has caught up with the placid present. The Indians are soon corrupted by the liquor that Jerrod's father illegally sells them. Civilization intrudes in other ways; a hard-boiled woman reporter publicizes Teawhit, drawing crowds of bumptious tourists, and con men stage a carnival and a rodeo-cheap shows that fake what once was real and vital. In the first of a series of almost ceremonial deaths, one Indian rams his model T into an imitation totem pole. Little Buckety dies when he falls off a bronco at the rodeo. Author...
...Royal Collection), and the commissioning of portraits was once almost as much a part of a horseman's way of life as racing or breeding or hunting. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the golden age of such art, painter after painter recorded England's placid world of privilege, where the horses often seemed to outrank the people. But of all the painters, none ever matched the horses of George Stubbs (see color...