Word: shiftlessness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Slender, clean-cut Martin Daniels Jr., 16, had a problem, a pal and a plan. Marty's problem was his father. Martin Daniels Sr.. 35, a shiftless unemployed dockworker. Even in seedy, rough-and-tumble South Philadelphia, where the Daniels family lived in a three-room, $50-a-month apartment, Daniels Sr. was known as a hard-drinking no-good with a long record of arrests-burglary, assault and battery, stabbing, and slugging a cop. He was also rough on Marty, eldest of his six sons-a roughness that hardened into perpetual rage last fall, when...
Fausto, Moraldo, Alberto, Leopoldo and Riccardo are five young men who live in a modest Italian sea-side resort of apparently little opportunity. They are shiftless and lusty, though they seldom show this latter quality to the camera. Their chief aim is thwarting their parent's attempts to civilize them by harnessing them with jobs. They just like to drink, laugh, dance...
...parsimonious use of cheap, irresponsible quacks has helped make the mother a hopeless dope fiend. The elder brother is a cynical and shiftless lush, the 23-year-old O'Neill an unconfident and consumptive fledgling writer. Nothing happens: four people merely taunt and bludgeon and resent one another while slowly, and at length explosively, revealing themselves. The play's movement is not forward, but downward and inward. In bedeviling propinquity, the drunken and the drugged exhibit spectral moments of love and convulsive moments of guilt, make accusations that are in effect confessions, go in for cruelties that...
Philadelphia's tabloid Daily News, once a shiftless tatterdemalion, has been gunning hard for circulation since Democratic Backer Matthew H. McCloskey Jr. took it over two years ago, infused it with money and ambition. Its chief rival: Publisher Walter Annenberg's Inquirer. Last week, in the climax of a month-long barrage, the News's guns pounded not only at the Inquirer's circulation, but at alleged payroll padding and loan-shark operations within the paper itself...
...however, rejects his suit, because the Count is not a very good security risk. The Count does not let this overly effect him, and returns to his flippant outlook. The most annoying thing about the book is the obvious and exuberant delight which the author takes in portraying a shiftless but engaging young man. The book is quite representative of run-of-the-mill fin de siecle writing, but the choice of Harvard scene and characters seems merely a vehicle for this glib and superficial kind of literature. In a few parts it is amusing, but one must wade through...