Word: quicksands
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...creative genius Of Hawthorne, Mr. Brooks draws a bolder and darker portrait, seeing him as the link between New England and the Middle Ages. A great writer whose thoughts were always turning on tales of witchcraft and madness, Hawthorne had a genius which was always threatened by the quicksand of melancholy. He enchanted children with stories that could make adults shiver and his writing "clung to the mind like music." Cut off from the sources of his inspiration in old age, after his travels abroad, Hawthorne's genius disintegrated where Emerson's grew more powerful. At last...
Humbler Moscow folks had a party too last week. The first seven miles of the first subway in Russia opened for business with three days of free rides for the Tovarishchi who helped build it. Driven through quicksand and swampy ground in two years of furious if ill-directed digging, largely by volunteer workmen, there are many things about Moscow's new subway to cause serious engineers to shake their heads, but it easily lives up to its motto: "The most beautiful subway in the world." Built, in the words of Transport Commissar Kaganovich, "to show people what...
...sand, an entirely different substance, supports weight quite well when undisturbed, but when piles are driven into it the whole mass suddenly liquefies and the piles sink. Quicksand is thus merely the upward flow of water through sand. Dry sand acts even more strangely; when all the air is pumped out, it becomes as hard as rock. This fact explains why foundations set on deep piles are usually safe...
When the South finally put secession to the proof, it found there was no stopping the dangerous principle; sectionalism was one of the causes of the South's defeat. Says Author Adams: "The united Confederacy was built upon the quicksand of shifting local loyalties." In 180 pages Adams retells, with balanced impartiality, the story of the Civil War, concludes: "The essence of our national tragedy has been that the section of our new country in which the humane view and way of life developed first should . . . have been forced ... to expend its intellectual energies against the trend...
...succeeds, after his antagonists have been able to commit only two murders, in outwitting them. Intermittently, caught in the whirlpool of tropical action, Miss Heather Angel and a recent British import named Douglas Walton add standard Hollywood romance to the picture. A motorboat chase and an expedition through a quicksand swamp form the principal excitements of the film, but it is the acting of Mr. Bruce and his cohorts which raises "Murder in Trinidad" above other thrillers...