Word: skillfulness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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George Harold Edgell spends his working hours in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, of which he is director. In his spare time, spruce, 62-year-old Edgell practices a rare and, he fears, a vanishing skill: hunting the wild bee.* Last week, in a pithy little book, The Bee Hunter (Harvard University Press; $2.50), he let the rest of the U.S. in on his secrets...
...said Nathan, the workers had earned a raise: "The buying power of hourly rates of pay ... in the steel industry increased one-seventh between 1939 and 1949, whereas productivity per man-hour rose by 50% ... In the short run, changes in productivity are more affected by changes in ... labor skill than by technology." (Another labor witness later conceded that "it is almost impossible to separate the contributions made by the worker, the machine, or management to increased productivity...
...Medical skill has made dramatic gains during recent years in saving the lives of premature babies, but along with this advance a disturbing fact was noted: among babies weighing less than three pounds at birth, about one out of eight went blind, usually in both eyes. Those weighing three to five pounds were less susceptible. By one estimate, the price of the advance in science was that 500 U.S. babies a year might be afflicted...
Nevertheless, A Rage to Live is peppered with evidences of O'Hara's technical writing skill. He still has an ear for dialogue that makes his characters' conversation as credible as if it were overheard, whether they are talking in a brothel or planning a dinner at home. His gallery is extensive (housewives, doctors, politicians, businessmen, lovers, prostitutes) and the people seem as true and alive as if the reader had just met them. But Novelist O'Hara seems satisfied with only a casual-meeting knowledge of his people. Reading A Rage to Live is almost...
There is just enough ingenuity in The Mudlark's conception and skill in its writing to sustain a fine long story. Author Bonnet has chosen to pad it outrageously in order to fill the regulation-size novel. The book suffers as a result, but it is pleasant enough for an afternoon of hammock reading...