Word: sadism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Spark of Life describes Mellern during the last few weeks of the war. It is the now familiar picture of men tortured beyond endurance, of torturers drugged with their own sadism. Starving men like 509 were continually on the edge of death; it was a daily surprise to wake up alive. Then the bombings and the approach of the Allies fanned the spark of life and gave a few of them the courage to hold on. No. 509 tried too, but he did not quite make...
When Clinton Truman Duffy became warden back in 1940, nobody expected that the prison would really change-even though he got the job because of public revulsion at the prison's sadism and corruption. San Quentin seemed to need a lion tamer, and Duffy was a mild, grey-haired little man who favored gold-rimmed spectacles and always wore a rosebud in his lapel. He was appointed temporarily, for only 30 days, while the governor looked for a more impressive crusader...
...lives and loves of his home, own, Fulton, Mo. (pop. 10,040). The first volume, Kings Row, published in 1940, leaded bestseller lists, sold more than a million copies, was made into a movie 'starring Robert Cummings and Ann sheridan) that kept much of the novel's sadism, incest and violence. After Bella-nann's death in 1945, his wife Katherine completed and published his Parris Mitchell of Kings Row. The third volume has never been written...
Floodtide (Dial; $3) is Frank Yerby's mixture as before, a crude, shrewd combination of sex, violence, sadism, costuming and cliche. Yerby, a 33-year-old Negro writer who hit a $250,000 jackpot with his first novel, The Foxes of Harrow, knows just what his customers like and gives it to them in heroic doses: Hero Ross Pary isn't quality in his home town of Natchez, Miss., but he returns there in 1850 with an Oxford education, a face "as clean-cut as a medallion," eyes "somber and brooding" and "plaid trousers, clinging to his well...
Dawn-Chilled Face. In a climax reminiscent of the horror of D. H. Lawrence's The Prussian Officer, Gerald prepares to punish the boy for still another theft. His sadism unleashed, he pummels Duncan to death and then "gently [kisses] the pale, dawn-chilled face...