Word: staffords
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CHILDREN ARE BORED ON SUNDAY (252 pp.)-Jean Stafford-Harcourf, Brace...
...finest of today's short-story writers usually probe into the remote corners of the heart. Preferably the heart should be broken, guilty or sick, but at the very least it must be troubled. One of the finest heart specialists now practicing in U.S. short fiction is Jean Stafford. A meticulous workman, she makes no quack's diagnosis, and the cases she has taken on have been few. Her favorites make up the table of contents of Children Are Bored on Sunday, and most of these stories are calculated to engage the heart of any reader...
...Author Stafford is a fine hand at finding the exact word, turning the perfect sentence. But what gives her stories their special stamp is a somberly muted tone of helpless rage that the things she writes about can be. Hers is no book in which to flip pages toward neatly contrived happy endings. It consists of ten small monuments to minor tragedy. Her trouble is that she cannot make them seem major...
...Summer Day has a heartache he did not help to make. He is a small Indian boy, an orphan shipped barefoot and alone from Missouri to an Indian school in Oklahoma. This is the kind of situation that is usually played for a lump in the throat, but Author Stafford never plays that way. What the reader gets from A Summer Day is a dry mouth and a hot, hopeless feeling of sympathy for the boy in his loneliness...
...every aggressive action"; the effect was that the Reich was free to attack the democracies while Russia grabbed half of Poland and the Baltic Republics: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia. Then Hitler invaded Russia. Talking before Allied diplomats, Stalin would speak to Molotov of "your treaty with Ribbentrop." Stalin startled Sir Stafford Cripps by offering to sack Molotov, if the British wished...