Word: sheed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...WILFRID SHEED...
...pages. Sheed & Ward...
George Santayana, that New England Spaniard, was such an outside-insider. So is Wilfrid Sheed, who-to his public's edification and entertainment -cannot make up his mind whether he will sound like an Oxford-trained critic, an Irish pub wit, a defrocked Catholic priest or a simply first-rate novelist. In any role, he is never more than, say, three-quarters American...
This time, in three long articles, Sheed studies American character collectively, as men-in-groups: the labor movement, the Catholic Church, the Mafia. Though developed, as a great many of Sheed's essays are today, from book reviews (the last piece is an exception), Three Mobs is not your ordinary journalistic wrapup, to say the least. Readers who are dying to know the number of dock strikes in 1962, or finger an organization chart of the Mafia hierarchy, or check back on the minutes of Vatican II will not find The Facts here. To read Sheed is, rather...
Here, for instance, is the American as son-of-Godfather: Bill Bonanno's thought processes, writes Sheed, "reminded me of Yogi Berra reading Gospel comics." Or the American as prototypical, George Meany-like labor leader, with "the gravelly voice, abraded in drafty meeting halls, the face of many weathers, and that style-watchful, patient, sufficiently charming for the political side of things. He tends to be built for sitting up all night, like a beer bottle, and his backside is probably as callused by now as his hands...