Word: slum
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...trying to show that the muscular and largely blind application of those two delusions in Viet Nam has helped make the country into an incipient urban slum, a vast garbage heap, and a burnt-out case of political and military folly, Griffiths follows the lead of Graham Greene, who more than 15 years ago, in The Quiet American, wrote what is still the most prescient book about the U.S. intervention in Indochina. Greene's American, it may be recalled, was well-intentioned and high-minded in a peculiarly tenacious and disastrous way. But his real problem was complete ignorance...
...Have-Have Not war, it would come very close to non-partisanship. The film's power is in the eye of Raoul Coutard, who here debuts as writer-director. American soldiers freeze in grotesque command postures. A theater explodes and its audience flees, losing intestines en route. Slum kids piss on a child-exploiting businesswoman's car. The connecting tissue doesn't equal the fragments, but these fragments are hard-edged stuff...
...even the commission is sure that more money would revolutionize the education of slum children. The committeemen were mindful, however, of the wry argument of Berkeley Law Professor John E. Coons, senior author of the most influential book in the current debate, Private Wealth and Public Education: "If money is inadequate to improve education, the residents of poor districts should at least have an equal opportunity to be disappointed by its failure...
Totally bereft of money and merchandise, Dante was too ashamed to face his wife Laura and five-year-old daughter Sabrina, who were waiting for him in their dismal one-room flat in the slum quarter of Centocelle. Instead, he clambered up the Colosseum, accompanied by a sympathetic friend (who climbed down again, half-frozen, after only 37 hours). Wrapped in a pink blanket that from a distance resembled a toga, Dante survived a dismally cold week on hard rolls, tea and water, sleeping on a ledge the size of a card table. Once, he slipped, almost fell...
Died. Betty Smith, 75, playwright and novelist who planted a durable oak when she published A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1943; in Shelton, Conn. Like Francie Nolan, Tree's heroine, Betty Smith grew up in a Brooklyn slum. After writing for and performing on the stage with modest success, she won instant fame with her first novel. Tree sold 6,000,000 copies, was made into a movie and a Broadway musical. Her three later novels, though bestsellers, were mere saplings in comparison. "I wish," she once mused, "I'd written my books in reverse...