Word: sordid
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Scrawny Turkey. Once he gained fame, Author Caldwell abandoned his narrow, though unusual gift. Prompted perhaps by the party-line critics and earnest sociologists who misread his sordid stories as profound exposures of Southern society,* Caldwell undertook to write "seriously." The result was lamentable: each of his recent novels is more inept than its predecessor, and the latest one is as scrawny a literary turkey as has been hatched...
...rest of the world; and readers of Graham Greene's previous novels will not have to read far in this one before they know that they have met Scobie and his world before. For this world, disguised though it is under African heat, is the same cruel, sordid, vulturous hell that Greene has conjured up in most of 14 books, and Hero Scobie is Greene's equally familiar creation-a sinner disguised as a hero-villain...
...They led Ruth Brown Snyder from her steel cage tonight. Then the powerful guards thrust her irrevocably into the obscene, sprawling oak arms of the ugly electric chair . . . The body that once throbbed with the joy of her sordid bacchanals turned brick red as the current struck . . . That was only 30 minutes ago. The memory of the crazed woman in her last agony as she struggled against the unholy embrace of the chair is yet too harrowing . . . She wore blue bloomers . . ." In such flamboyant journalese, flamboyant Hearstling Gene Fowler described the executions of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray...
...Sordid Quest. Among the witnesses against the brothers were six former patients, all from outside Indiana. An old man from Texas told how he had been instructed to discontinue insulin and eat sweets, if he liked. His toes began to turn black, and eventually his leg had to be amputated. A 14-year-old girl told the court that after she had used nine jugs of the Kaadt magic medicine, her eyes clouded over with cataracts...
...Kaadts were found guilty. Last week Judge Patrick T. Stone sentenced them each to three years in prison and fined them $7,000 and costs. Said the judge to the old brothers: "You have been engaged in a widescale, sordid, evil and vicious enterprise without the slightest regard or consideration for the patient that consulted you . . . You were cold, vicious and heartless in your quest for wealth...