Word: ruthlessness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...young soldier he has courage, stamina and ambition. He admits: "I desired the supreme power ... to become my full self before I died." As emperor he proves ruthless and gifted, fighting the imperial wars, defending the Roman peace, reorganizing Britain and the Rhine frontier. Above all, the book shows how the soldier-monarch, despite his successes in holding together the large, unwieldy empire, turns inward and becomes more and more the scholarly stoic, meditating on history, immortality and death. His last words are: "Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes...
...more populous northern half is being welded together with ruthless Communist efficiency; the southern or free half is rent by feuds, and impotently governed by its honest but ineffective Premier Ngo Dinh Diem. Last week, in an effort to restore some order in South Viet Nam, President Eisenhower dispatched former U.S. Army Chief of Staff General J. Lawton Collins to Indo-China as his special ambassador. It will be Joe Collins' task to try to resolve the feuding between Diem and his generals, to coordinate and overhaul all U.S. aid to the tortured nation, to combat "the dangerous forces...
MAMMY PLEASANT'S PARTNER, by Helen Holdredge (300 pp.; Putnam; $4.50), a follow-up on last year's intriguing Mammy Pleasant, tells what happened in brash, crime-infested 19th century San Francisco when an unprincipled Scotsman, fleeing a murky past, teamed up with a ruthless quadroon beauty, in pursuit of a glittering future. Mammy was born a Georgia slave. She had a wasp waist and an eagle eye, and when she bared her claws neither slow prey nor a fast buck had a chance of getting away. Among other things, Mammy was a madame who lavishly entertained...
...opposing business methods clash they are amusing, but when the picture tries to reconcile them, showing that everyone is really a brick beneath a seemingly loathsome exterior, the result is dreary. In one especially painful scene, Paul Douglas as the mogul, is almost seduced from the business virtues of ruthless efficiency and unbridled avarice that the British evidently find peculiarly American. When a gentle Scottish lass tells him about the beauties of indolence, the mogul seems about to chuck a princely fortune and sign aboard the Scots boat as cabin...
...unionists were disturbed to find that union leaders are not workers but party functionaries. Working conditions are poor, they agreed, but Harry Earnshaw happily reported that improvements "are being slowly made, not-as might be thought-by ruthless sweating, but by active and willing cooperation among the workers in the exercise of what is called 'social conscience,' and by methods which are not inconsistent with our union traditions, and which are selflessly designed to increase production...