Word: poleax
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...demon boxer, wrestler, rugby player. Before he got his medical degree he shipped on an Arctic whaler as naval surgeon, began the voyage by hanging a mouse on the steward's eye, ended it covered with snow and blood after charging a herd of seals with a poleax. "I just feel as if I could go anywhere, and do anything," he told his admiring mother...
Eight years ago, in Tommy Gallagher's Crusade, James T. Farrell beat his readers over the head with a poleax to make much the same point. Novelist Harry Sylvester, born in Brooklyn and schooled at Notre Dame, is considerably subtler as a storyteller, though hardly more graceful as a writer. Aloysius ("Moon") Gaffney is no anti-Semitic bullyboy like Tommy Gallagher, but a young Manhattan Irishman with a Fordham law degree and large horizons. With luck he will soon become an Assemblyman in Albany, and perhaps in time even sit in the big chair in New York...