Word: sam
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Like anyone lavishing money around, and often incurring more ill will among those he disappoints than friendship among those he favors, Uncle Sam finds it hard to get across the notion that aid programs are not certificates of sympathy and merit but barometers of danger, need and opportunity. Cold-war spending is a jumble of crash programs, hard bargaining and erratic generosity. The circumstances which determine who among friends and neutrals gets the most money, however, are not all of U.S. making. Sometimes the degree of a country's exposure to military and political intrusion by the Communists...
...shades of green chiffon. Blazing the way toward a new style was Mrs. Randolph Burgess, wife of the Under Secretary of the Treasury: in place of a corsage, she sported a miniature display of the medals that she won as a WAC in World War II. House Speaker Sam Rayburn, who does not hold with such flossy doings, hovered so long behind the punch bowl that a fellow finally offered him a cupful. Scotch-Drinker Mr. Sam was incredulous: "Are you serious?" he asked. This was the last chance this year to invite Wisconsin's Senator Joe McCarthy...
...Make a World" is a searching assessment of a critical period in the life of Sam Norris, a young college administrative assistant. Norris' immediate problem is to effect a working liaison between the college and a charitable foundation of enormous wealth, but basically he must educate himself to operate in a world of diverse personalities. Sam discovers in his work with the foundation that there is no escaping personalities, and the sudden disintegration of this admired circle into which he has entered teaches him the painful error of his early statement, "People are a class that doesn't include...
Throughout the book runs the echo of the new era, recalling the sky-splitting trajectory of a jet plane that catches Sam's eye at the opening of the story. The choice between destruction and survival is implicit even in the work of the foundation, which divides its time between charity for true education and the preparation of the Disaster Clinic for a possible holocaust. And Morrison suggests that as time runs out for men, so it may run out for our civilization, unnoticed until too late. But for all this, the education of Sam Norris ends...
This is its excellence: it honestly faces and thoroughly explores a situation from which our escape will be difficult. And the reader comes to feel, with Sam Norris, "I guess the hour has always been late... Someday it may really be late,, who knows? The bomb is about to fall, the apocalypse is overdue, we'd all better make up for lost time and apply ourselves to the true education...