Word: sordidity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...that were all, The Narrows would be merely the retelling of a sordid tabloid standby. But Author Petry, serious as she is about her seriously told plot, almost lets it take second place to other and better things: Negro life in broken-down Bumble Street, Aunt Abbie's sturdy effort to clothe her existence in dignity. Best of all is the rich parallel story of little Malcolm Powther, the dignified Treadway butler, and his blowsy, handsome, blues-singing, two-timing wife. Link and Camilo have a fictional survival period of one publishing season at best. Had Author Petry stuck...
...bear the kind of responsibility that Winston Churchill in World War I ascribed to Admiral Jellicoe. commander of the British Grand Fleet: "The only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon." In that sense, Allen Dulles has the most important mission in the long, sordid, heroic and colorful history of the intelligence services. This scholarly, hearty, pipe-smoking lawyer is in strange contrast to some of his famous predecessors in intelligence history...
...politicians. Tobey's righteous anger touched a responsive public nerve. Most of the watching public wanted, as Tobey did. to cut the gangsters down to size. His Yankee homilies, Bible quotations and Latin cliches were from another era, a fresh New Hampshire breeze in the midst of the sordid drama...
...unemployment compensation, and took credit for them to boot. But through the '30s, Young Bob worked faithfully in alliance with the New Deal on its domes tic program (exception: he wanted a pay-as-you-go tax system). His Civil Liberties Committee barnstormed across the U.S., exposing a sordid underside of U.S. big business in the days when business was dead set against organized labor. He probed the bloody Memorial Day riot at Chicago's Republic Steel plant (10 dead), and laid the blame on Chicago's goonlike police force. He reported that some 2,500 companies...
From fictional materials as simple as these, Mississippi-born Jefferson Young, 31, has spun a completely successful story, as true as it is humble, as convincing as humble truth. A Good Man does unobtrusively what the sordid sharecropper novels of the Erskine Caldwell school have never been able to do: it generates enormous sympathy for the Albert Claytons at the same time that it gives them dignity; it refuses to be defeatist about their future so long as heart and conscience have their say in human affairs...