Word: straightener
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...poet named Bezdomny has brilliantly executed a commission, a poem on Christ, but although it is correctly derisive, his work commits the error of assuming that Christ actually existed. Bezdomny's editor, Berlioz, is straightening out his tame poet on his shaky ideology when the Devil arrives to straighten them both out. Beautifully dressed, learned and well-spoken (the Prince of Darkness being a gentleman), Satan is amused by their respectable atheism. To teach them a lesson about his powers-and about the reality of the supernatural-he turns soothsayer and predicts that the editor will be beheaded...
Neither Heineman nor Provo could be called a typical railroad man. Heineman is a lawyer who got into the railroad business after a 1954 proxy fight, when he took control of the smallish Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway. A 27-year-old accountant named Provo was brought in to help straighten out the corporate mess. Heineman liked Provo, and soon after hired him away from Arthur Andersen & Co., the accounting firm, and gave him a vice-presidency. Two years later, Heineman moved to the C. & N.W. and took Provo along...
...blacks-on-the-rise who provide the cruel counterpoint of white degeneration. The "boy" leaves for a job in the post office, a motorscooter, and a sharp suit of store clothes on credit; the kitchen "girl," brooding on mail-order creams to lighten the skin and straighten the hair, achieves status and pregnancy by sleeping with the white "bass." On this level, integration makes a mess of both races. Archie Ferris expresses liberal sentiments toward the blacks; in practice, his enlightened principles are expressed by going on a three-day drunk with his ex-servant, who rides off with...
...watchers should soon sort out the exaggerated news reports and realize that China is likely to remain still communist and still mysterious for a long time. To this day we know little about the post-Stalinist power struggle in Russia; the upheaval in China should be as difficult to straighten out. To the beast of our knowledge this week's conflict is at least partially the result of a tug of war between provincial and national leaders in China, a tug of war in which the two teams temporarily have lost patience, dropped the rope, and rushed each other...
...will probably, for example, change West Germany's election system from proportional representation to direct balloting in order to stop the free-riding splinter parties from proliferating and to give the big parties a better chance to obtain clear majorities. The coalition will also have the opportunity to straighten out the country's complicated tax and budgetary problems and to push through some of the tough measures that are needed to regulate the German economy...