Word: ruefulnesses
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...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...
...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...
...right? Is there, in fact, any polemical stake that society can drive once and for all into the heart of this monster from the past, and so dispose of the problem? Clearly not. Cleverly, wisely, Davidson offers no final solution. Instead he slowly turns the book into a rueful seminar on the possibilities that men have of ever "making good again" after various sorts of failure. In the process, the word Wiedergutmachung becomes a kind of pun that can be read on a number of levels, some hopeful, some somber: restoring to virtue a society that has lost its virtue...
...When the following years brought sit-ins and freedom rides, King was there with organizational support. He formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and midwifed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Nonetheless, his preoccupation with ideas instead of details was irking his own camp, and Albany, Ga., gave him a rueful jolt. In 1961, just two days after he led a mass demonstration and found himself in jail, vowing to stay there until Albany consented to desegregate its public facilities, King was out on bail and the campaign collapsed. "We thought that the victory had been won," he said. "When...