Word: silver
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...home." She also nurses old grudges (e.g., the Smith vendetta against the promotion of Actor James Stewart to be an Air Force brigadier general), sometimes writes tart notes to erring constituents. She shuns the Washington social whirl, lives quietly in a three-apartment building in suburban Silver Spring, Md. The other apartments are occupied by Bill Lewis, her ubiquitous administrative assistant, and his parents. Her office is run with taut efficiency, and every letter is answered by return, mail. One fetish: her insistence on maintaining a near-perfect record of voting on every Senate measure, however trivial. The record...
...SILVER BACCHANAL (305 pp )Rene Fü;p-Miller-Atheneum ($4.50). Somewhere, some time, in southeastern Europe, the remnants of a beaten army shuffle into the city of Drohitz there to regroup before facing an unidentified enemy once more. These are the same weary, mud-stained troops who fought a hopeless battle for a useless hill in Allegorist Fü;p-Miller's The Night of Time, May 9, 1955); and to them Drohitz is something more than a well-fed peasant town. It is the focus of their tront-lme dreams, a city of dazzling peacetime...
...crisis changes the army from guest to Gestapo. The Mashinka is quarantined; a grimly comic campaign is organized to fight the disease. Drohitzers who might have been exposed are rounded up and lodged in the Silver Hall, the mirror-lined banquet room of the Mashinka's most fashionable bordello. Confinement quickly erases the difference between whore and housewife, who come to share each other's concerns: a prim matron tries a striptease, the prostitutes study cake recipes. Eventually quarantine proves ineffective. The infection rages through Drohitz and the surrounding countryside and Ember, promoted from subaltern to Commissioner...
Hollow Laughter. In The Night of Time, Author Fü;p-Miller, an encyclopedic, Hungarian-born historian who teaches sociology at Manhattan's Hunter College, produced a soberly symbolic essay on the fatuity of war. Wider in scope, The Silver Bacchanal reveals man as an Absurd Animal, torn between hope and despair, ideal love and an insatiable lust. Fü;p-Miller's instrument of dissection is irony, e.g., the army's bureaucratic campaign against disease-carrying houseflies, in which the city is divided into sectors manned by bumbling brigades of swatters. But the laughter...
...also suffers from Fü;p-Miller's one-dimensional characterization: across a symbolic landscape, only sardonic Adam Ember (Hungarian for "man"') plods with recognizably human gait. But despite such weaknesses, The Silver Bacchanal is genuinely disturbing as a brutish vision of the dark cravings that often lurk beneath the thin texture of civilization...