Word: sordidity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...moved to accept Khrushchev's picture of himself and other top Stalin aides as innocent men caught up in a web of terror against which there was no possible protest. What finally decided the release of the text was the fact that the speech revealed such a sordid picture of Communist intrigue that it could not but have a demoralizing effect on Communist Parties outside the Soviet Union. As it turned out, this was the wiser counsel...
...steeped in humanity than people who work. No living U.S. writer has done more to keep the idea alive, and no one has done it with more literary authority than Chicago Novelist Nelson Algren. His Man with the Golden Arm, 1949's best U.S. novel, dealt with a sordid world of petty crime and drug addiction that shocked many a queasy reader, but it was so firmly rimmed by compassion and understanding that no one could doubt its literary worth. His new one, A Walk on the Wild Side, reinforces his right to the title of poet laureate...
...school year, I can feel only pity for the muddleheaded burghers who fired him. Dismal, hopeless mediocrity is the most serious menace to present-day primary and secondary education in America. There is no room in Riceville for originality, no tolerance there of intellectual inquiry. If this sordid phenomenon were limited solely to Riceville, Iowa, Americans would have small cause for worry; unfortunately, it is not. The real reason Paul was dismissed is that his students were beginning to think for themselves-not just during classtime, but after school as well. JAMES H. RANSOM Stanford, Calif...
...painters managed to outrage the respectable standards of their day with more gusto than France's master of 19th century realism, Gustave Courbet. In his time he kept up a running battle with critics, who found his work sordid and common, termed him a "butcher" and "a great stupid painter." Today Courbet's work is attacked from the new academy of abstraction as too photographic...
...military" genius and accused him of fleeing the Kremlin during the defense of Moscow. Evidently it was not possible for the party leaders to speak so directly to the Russian people without risking a public convulsion. Thus they chose the indirect approach, but the ugly story in all its sordid detail was there to be read by every Russian who could remember back...