Word: sheean
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...Vincent Sheean, one of the last men to give up a fight against reaction, wrote democratic Spain's obituary when, after inspecting the scene, he reported...
...excellent memoirs, published last week, showed that perhaps he had missed his calling again. A competent newspaperman, he might have been a better novelist. The light he sheds on world affairs flickers somewhat dimly beside the flashes of Duranty, Gunther, Sheean; but for character vignettes and earthy episodes, he beats the lot. Examples: >The headmaster of his grammar school in Gorcum, Holland, was a tightlipped, frog-eyed, wrinkled Huguenot with the curling fingernails of a Chinese mandarin and the literal severity of a Spanish Inquisitor. He beat a boy to unconsciousness for writing the phrase "snowflakes fluttering from a pitilessly...
Touchiest subjects are political disputes, but most clubs have approved forthright political studies like Vincent Sheean's Personal History, John Gunther's enlightening Inside Europe. Club programs show that much emphasis is placed on light romances. But in the last two years almost every important club in the U. S. has endorsed Van Wyck Brooks's The Flowering of New England, which most U. S. critics would place near the top in any list of U. S. post-War works of literature...
Most impressive part of A Day of Battle is its account of the strategy of the two generals, one of the most lucid of recent fictional accounts of military maneuvers, apparently modeled on the greater panoramas of Tolstoy's War and Peace. Mr. Sheean's proof of the historical unimportance of the French victory is more tenuous, principally in the soliloquies of the French Foreign Minister, D'Argenson, who reflects as he leaves the field that the French aristocracy had won only with the help of "the savage exiled Irish," that there could be no real victory...
...Battle, a far better book than Mr. Sheean's last novel, Sanfelice, is compact and tightly organized instead of sprawling and discursive. But having acknowledged the historical unimportance of the victory, Mr. Sheean's triumph with A Day of Battle sometimes resembles the triumph of the French at Fontenoy...