Word: smotheration
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...years in a German concentration camp in which she lost her husband and parents, she has a derelict's vision of the world as a place where love is impossible and the human condition hopeless. The secret of survival in such a world, she has learned, is to smother every flicker of feeling. The old man appeals to her at first because he seems to offer her comfort in exchange for a minimum emotional payment on her part...
...alone in its desire to get to the bottom of DeAngelis' tangled affairs. Senator John L. McClellan, who never minds working in the glare of headlines, has launched a "quiet study" to see whether his investigative committee should look in. Convinced that any new controls by Washington would smother trading, the nation's commodity exchanges have set up committees to stiffen margin requirements and trading rules. Nonetheless, other indictments are expected to follow the one handed down last week, and FBI agents are investigating the seemingly endless possibilities of legal violations that could involve others than Tino DeAngelis...
...prove his first charge--that Allied terror bombing was not only cruel but militarily useless--Rumpf marshalls an impressive array of evidence. The British had hoped to smother the German economy by burning out the hearts of German industrial cities. Strangely enough, however, cities like Essen, Cologne, and Berlin, which by 1944 had been reduced to charred shells of their former selves, were producing munitions at the same rate as before the air raids. Hamburg, for example, suffered four devastating night attacks in a nine day period in the summer of 1943 which killed 60,000 civilians and demolished half...
...maid, one of those wispy little women who flutter through the literature of the South like a flock of steel butterflies. She lives in a rotting ancestral manse, she graciously permits her spinster sister (Wendy Hiller) to wait on her hand and foot, she justifies her gistless existence by smother-mothering her younger brother (Dean Martin). The brother is a frivolous failure and she likes him that way. He makes her feel necessary, he makes her feel important; and in pursuing his problems she escapes...
Originality comes especially dear in retelling wars that are neither small nor remote enough to make individual actions seem romantic. Ghastly statistics simply smother any kind of gaudy derring-do. For a battle narrative set within the slaughter of thirty million human beings, the courage and suffering of ordinary people are the only legitimate themes...