Word: self
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...year-old copy boy he is in the novel's opening chapters; Blyden's lines still snarl with Sammy's hungry, terrifying drive. Nor does it matter very much that the gutter gags had to be cleaned up, that the Jewish humor is sacrificed to the self-conscious contemporary convention that seldom allows so much as a smile with a racial or religious twist. Although the word is taboo, the poor exploited slob who ghosted Sammy's screenplays is still a nebbish; every now and then, Blyden's voice echoes with accurate Lower East Side...
...last day of the season, the Giants blew it; they lost to the Cardinals, 2-1. But in Chicago, the Dodgers' jug-eared Pitcher Craig was the soul of self-assurance ("I'm not cocky-I'm confident"), threw his soft stuff at the Cubs for four innings, then switched to his fastball to win 7-1. But the Braves stayed alive more because of Phillies' boners than their own skills...
...product of a "death drive"? Is civilization at the mercy of a nameless army of self-annihilators, men who kill with an almost sexual relish because they are secretly in love with death? In The War Lover (an October Book-of-the-Month Club choice), Novelist John Hersey (The Wall, A Single Pebble) has apparently sworn by the beard of Freud to bed Mars on the analyst's couch...
...billingsgate, yips earsplitting war whoops as the bombs drop away, and slavers over off-duty hobbies that would make good latrine-wall copy. Why diffident Copilot Charles Boman, the novel's first-person narrator, hero-worships Buzz is a mystery, but it is presumably because Marrow oozes self-confidence and is a genius at the flight controls. Poor Bo is colorless, decent, sensitive about being short, and his virtue consists of the absence of vice...
...Count de Montholon, General Gourgaud, Count Las Cases-had accompanied him into exile out of mixed motives of avarice, reflected glory and-last and least-devotion. It was believed that Napoleon had 6,000,000 francs in Europe (he actually had half of that). Bertrand was perhaps the least self-seeking, but he lost status when Mme. Bertrand refused to become Napoleon's mistress. With or without the hint, Mme. de Montholon was a wily enough schemer to indulge the fallen emperor, and the Montholons got their reward: 2,000,000 francs in Napoleon's will...