Word: probe
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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What keeps the whole collection from descending to the merely pathological is an undercurrent of compassion and a ruthless economy of phrase that never slashes when it can slice and never slices when it can probe. None of the stories has a surplus word or a spare character. In every one, the situation is stripped down to its essentials and developed with a sure swiftness and precision. Unpleasant as they are, his first stories put Author Wilson near the head of the class...
...Very few students subjected to the check here would fail to pass," he said, "but the F.B.I. probe will discourage many people who might otherwise try for a fellowship. Besides, it will tend to make faculty members informers on student political activities, and create a generally bad atmosphere...
...removed the clause calling for investigation of all "persons sympathetic to communism or its doctrines"; the other widened the probe's scope from the teaching profession to all suspected communist activities...
Looking ahead, the editors of the London Journal saw surgery losing its importance: "Sulphonamides and antibiotics are making themselves mercifully felt as alternatives to the knife and the probe. Should . . . a medical remedy be found for cancer . . . if not in the next 50 years, at least within an imaginable span of time, the torchbearers of surgery will illuminate only that narrow field offered by injury to the body. In the medical millennium there will be only one kind of surgery-traumatic surgery...
...problem of sin, merely points up man's well-known moral fallibility. It leaves untouched the problem of expiation of sin by those whose conduct, however understandable, is morally and socially damnable. And its major thesis, that man, to win salvation, must boldly examine his acts and probe his subconscious for their meaning, is hardly more than a fictional plug for the value of psychoanalysis...