Word: tales
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Back in 1948, the President answered critics of his White House balcony by saying that Mrs. Fillmore "almost got lynched" after her husband put in the first bathtub. Eighteen months ago, while escorting Novelist John (The Wall) Hersey through the presidential mansion, Truman retold the tale. White House Secretary Bill Hassett, who was standing at his elbow, gently told the President the awful truth...
Truman was undiscouraged. Last week, in a speech to federal hospital executives at Philadelphia, the President not only retold the Fillmore bathtub tale, but improved it: Mrs. Fillmore (rather than the President), he said, had installed the first bathtub in the White House, and for her pains had been censored by Cincinnati doctors as an indecent person...
Comb Land. The rest of the voyage to Callao was easy. As Dr. Davis neared the Peruvian coast, he recalled an old tale of the islands. A Polynesian expedition under Chief Maui Marumamao, says the legend, sailed east from Easter Island and came to "a land with ridges like a comb." The Peruvian coast is like that, with steep, barren ridges running down to the sea. There the Polynesians built a temple, but they did not stay long because they did not find what they needed: fertile land near the sea. This description also matches Peru, for most...
...describes his picture as "tragicomedy." It has neither the passion of Marlowe's and Goethe's Fausts nor the visual inventiveness of Clair's best films (Sous les Toits de Paris, A Notts La Liberte), but it is an unconventional and diverting treatment of a traditional tale...
...Distant Shore, especially in its second half, is definitely outclassed by the destroyer-escorts and transports whose course it will cross in the fiction lists. But Author De Hartog's prose is polished, and he knows how to tell a tale of men and ships...