Word: plot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...concoction of situational cliches, overworn ideas and stereotyped characters. There is the sour corporation president, the xenophobic grande dame, the iconoclastic philosophy professor, the ambitious junior executive, and the young wife who upsets everything by refusing to be a lickspittle. The structure is creaky, and the turns of the plot wholly predictable. Celeste Holm did her best as the young wife, but she was just wasting her time...
...acre plot dotted with ten brick buildings a few miles outside Bogota is a privately operated project that one American diplomat calls "the most outstanding example of technical assistance in South America." There last week five grain specialists, with their assistants, painstakingly harvested and examined 30,000 different wheat strains from Canada, Russia, the U.S., Germany, Brazil, Britain, Chile, Mexico, India, while other workers planted experimental fields containing thousands more for harvest and research next year. Some day soon the scientists of Tibaitata Experiment Station hope to find the strains that best combine yield, taste, nutritional quality, disease and insect...
This forthright statement on a subject that had been rumored for months shocked officials, set diplomats and newsmen scurrying to find out precisely what Noon meant. Opposition leaders and newspapers detected a plot. Behind Noon, they cried, "was the same hidden hand which forced us into the Baghdad Pact...
Author MacInnes (a Jumble himself) appears to know and like his Spades, manages to write of them without condescension-and without condescension's obverse, the kind of Negro-worship shown by U.S. Beatnik Jack Kerouac. The book's slight plot sags a little, but the gaiety and moroseness of wild, roiled lives are well told, and the reader gets a Spadeful of irony as the dark minstrel Lord Alexander sings...
Again the novel's narrator is Darley, a seedy, itinerant Irish schoolteacher. Again the plot concerns his sexual and soulful involvements with Justine, a feline Egyptian Jewess; Nessim, her millionaire husband; Melissa, a tubercular Greek dancer. There is also an assortment of other exotics, who seem to have crawled from beneath a blistered and immemorial stone of Alexandria-Scobie, the transvestite policeman; Toto de Brunei, who dies with a hatpin rammed through his brain; Capodistria, the goatish sybarite; hare-lipped Narouz, who carries a severed head in his saddlebag; Pursewarden, who has discovered "the uselessness of having opinions...