Word: roost
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...poor and pious Singer family, home stood at the head of a stinking, garbage-strewn Warsaw slum stairway. There Isaac Bashevis' red-bearded rabbi father (who chastely refused to look a woman in the face and could not, insists Author Singer, recognize his own wife) learnedly ruled his roost. He also ruled his rabbinical court, the Beth Din, an institution that dated from the days of Moses and was a blend of synagogue, law court and psychoanalyst's consulting room for the superstitious, the bereaved and the troubled. For Isaac Bashevis, it exemplified "the celestial council of justice...
...pass his own criteria for rationality and honesty, and as he matured, intellectually, those criteria became more difficult to meet. Ostensibly his break with the Black Muslims was a result of his ill-timed statement on the assassination of President Kennedy ("The chickens have come home to roost"), but really the break was based on ideological and practical differences over how the Black Muslims should be led. The fissure grew out of Malcolm's intellectual independence, not his dogmatism...
...meant to be a completely objective account, the Autobiography is much more than a partisan diatribe. Written with the cooperation of Alex Haley, the book contains its share of excerpts from Malcolm's speeches and glosses over a few unflattering situations (such as Malcolm's "chickens coming home to roost" statement, which is not even reproduced in its embarrassing entirely), but for the most part it is a surprisingly detached chronicle...
...avoided speaks as eloquently for Capote's tone as he does through it. In speaking largely through biographical discursions, which balance and pace the actual story, he has given the speculators on crime and criminal processes much more than an abused rhetoric about society's chickens coming home to roost. Subtly but tellingly, In Cold Blood dispassionately surveys the roost itself: a society in which men such as Hickock and Smith, with IQs of 130, will continue to destroy themselves and others. It is the sort of survey which makes the Police Gazette, criminologists' case histories, liberal weeklies' temporiz...
...charm is that the old man did not consciously set out to recount history, but only to leave his descendants a straightforward personal account of all he saw and did. And that was considerable. One of Meriwether's earliest memories, for example, is of the massacre at Pigeon Roost, Kentucky, when Indian followers of Tecumseh slaughtered 24 white settlers. He was only eleven, but his father sent him off on horseback to warn the Kentucky countryside that the Indians were on the rampage. At 14, he rode 100 miles in 48 hours carrying military dispatches. He trekked...