Word: retreating
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...begin to solve his country's continuing agricultural crisis. In Red China, faced with his own agricultural crisis, Mao Tsetung launched 1958's most audacious political act, ordering his 650 million subjects into human anthills called "people's communes." But at year's end he was compelled to retreat, not because of popular resentment (which did not bother him), but because his scheme was not working at all well...
...mention at all of the even touchier situation created by the Communists in Iraq. Nasser's regime signed a contract with a Soviet delegation in Cairo for the building of Nasser's Aswan high dam, and Nasser's propagandists, covering the boss's anxious retreat, put out the naive-sounding line that Arabs must distinguish sharply between bad local Communists and good Russians. Nothing in the Syrian unpleasantness, wrote Nasser's trained seal. Editor Mohammed Heikal of Al Ahram, must be allowed to affect "in any way the great victory we achieved in earning...
Naked, confronted by a world they have faced only in these moments of confessed idiocy, they must retreat blushing. As perhaps the Lampoon's greatest admirers, we can but suggest that its late membership seek new outlets--the Advocate, or perhaps, for the more ambitious, the Yearbook...
Taking Josie to bed and to wife is not a rational act on Dillon's part, but an admission of defeat; a retreat into the ghastly middle-class morass that he describes so frequently and with such emphatic relish; a form of suicide. Having effected this mock-death, he speaks his own epitaph, in which he convicts himself of total futility...
...good as the original. Whether or not that is so, as it now reads, The Odyssey is by all odds the most impressive literary achievement of many a year. It bears out the feeling Kazantzakis once expressed, in describing a form of spiritual conversion he underwent during a solitary retreat in the mountains: "Since then I have felt ashamed to commit any vulgar act, to lie, to be overcome by fears, because I know that I also have a great responsibility in the progress of the world. I work and think now with certainty, for I know that my contribution...