Word: rueful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...HAVE BEEN GETTING lusty cheers and jeers for a rueful little paragraph I recently wrote about student riots. The most eloquent (and savage) letter ended: "Drop dead!!!" Another diatribe was signed "Columbia Senior." I wish I knew where to send this reply to both: Dear...
...occasion for these and other reflections is an agonizing, funny, profoundly rueful attempt by Vonnegut to handle in fable form his own memories of the strategically unnecessary Allied air raid on Dresden that killed 135,000 people. The book's narrator, like Vonnegut, lived through the raid as a prisoner of war in an underground slaughterhouse. Like Vonnegut, too, he has spent more than 20 years trying to mark out the limits of its metaphoric meaning in a book...
Another writer might be resentful of the past. But Vonnegut holds no grudges. He is, in general, a man more rueful than wrathful. Black-humorist contemporaries often vibrate with a febrile, apocalyptic rage, seeming to feel that America has the market cornered on greed and hypocrisy. Vonnegut takes a longer view. Though he has an old-fashioned Populist's distrust of the rich and powerful manipulators of society, Vonnegut's is closer kin to Twain than Kafka. Deeply pessimistic about the world, he is rarely depressed by it. Part of him, at least, would contemplate even the story...
...Guarantees. Reasoner's appeal to devotees is his ability to cloak the pit falls of life in smiles. His rueful comment on losing a billfold, with all its credit cards and documents of identity: "Life is laid out there on the desk, the circumspection of a respectable existence, and I'd hate to spend another day with nothing but an honest face to prove my right to a place in the Great Society." Sometimes accused of being too light, Reasoner said in an interview last week: "I think light is just as much a part of news...
...conscience, he espoused a variety of socialism that was questioning rather than doctrinaire, Christian rather than Marxist, democratic rather than totalitarian. Much of what he sought in social welfare legislation was eventually adopted by those who once recoiled from his proposals. "The ultimate token of approval," he said with rueful satisfaction, "is that the Democrats and Republicans have stolen my thunder." Son of a Presbyterian minister, valedictorian of Princeton's class of 1905, six times Socialist candidate for President of the U.S., Norman Mattoon Thomas made an his toric mark. He died in his sleep last week...