Word: poignant
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...OHara's Where's the Game? -still worth more than a white chip. Some of them, though, seem to begin after the deal has started and end before the reader gets his fifth card. Best of the lot, perhaps, is Somerset Maugham's Straight Flush, a poignant tale of a man burdened with failing eyesight, and not idiocy, who chose the one time in 64,973 chances to misread his hand and toss a small straight, all pink into the discard. The gentleman gave up his hobby of a lifetime and directed his future interests toward philanthropy...
...between such differing masters of dialectics and irony, there is something poignant and lyrical (because more pessimistic) in Giraudoux that is not found in Shaw. Yet here the two men touch, for Shaw wrote a kind of Tiger at the Gates in Caesar and Cleopatra. Each man saw worlds about to overturn through a queen's lure; in Shaw's Caesar as in Giraudoux's Hector, the great warrior is the great hater of war; in Shaw's Caesar as in Giraudoux's Ulysses, the wise man sadly grasps the impotence of wisdom. And both...
...fresh, but Stan and even Amy play the losing game with stubborn dignity, unlike their children. Author White is overfond of the eye-stopping metaphor ("She was brushed in sad gusts by the branches of the music"), but at his best, he makes long-suffering Stan at least as poignant as Markham's Man with the Hoe. Stan's mute wisdom is in knowing that endurance is all. Author White's literary unwisdom is in worrying this theme for so long that his novel itself becomes a kind of endurance test...
...whose name and face were familiar to newspaper readers across the U.S. Everyone knew that the youngster was safe, but no one could say that she had not been harmed. Hildy McCoy, born out of wedlock to a Roman Catholic mother, was the innocent victim of a bitter and poignant custody case. To avoid giving her up, her Jewish foster parents had hidden her in defiance of Massachusetts...
With these perceptive lines, punctuated by the frayed, nostalgic jazz of the 1920s, NBC-Radio News last week opened an hour-long Biographies in Sound (Tues. 9 p.m., E.D.T.) of F. Scott Fitzgerald. It proved to be a poignant re-creation of the tragic life and happy times of one of the most gifted American writers of the 20th century. It also showed off radio at its nonvisual, imaginative best. In the same field, television, with all its gaudy resources, might have distorted a story that simple words and music truly evoked. Biographies, a sustaining show with a tiny budget...