Word: tediousness
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...which intense and frustrated family feeling still provided the guiding theme. A 468-page chronicle that begins 'strongly, drifts to an unconvincing conclusion, Cradle of Life belongs in the ran!: of those books that are interesting for the facts they give on unfamiliar environments, but are made tedious by hackneyed and romantic plots. Louis Adamic's interesting facts include descriptions of the perils faced by Balkan bastards. In pre-War Croatia these waifs, called fachooks, were commonly placed in peasant homes in wild regions. As long as funds were regularly provided for their upkeep they were kept alive...
...tedious romance of Cradle of Life deals with an aristocratic fachook who grew up in one of these peasant households, escaped it only to find that its ties were too strong to be broken. Learning to love his pathetic, awkward foster mother, Rudo Stanka suffered agony each time a new waif was brought to the poverty-ridden hut to die. He did not solve the mystery of his birth until he had been whisked away to a castle, educated. Then he discovered that he was the son of Rudolf, the brilliant, impetuous heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary...
Since Metternich's career was an almost unbroken series of triumphs after Napoleon's fall until his own, in the Austrian Revolution of 1848, his biography deals principally with intricate diplomatic maneuvers, grows more tedious as it advances. The best pages in Author du Coudray's book consequently cover Metternich's relations with Napoleon, and the Congress of Vienna. Born in Coblentz in 1773, Metternich was educated at Strasbourg a short time after Napoleon. He possessed a practical, precise mind that made him disinterested in diplomacy, interested in science. Leaving his diplomatic apprenticeship in Dresden...
...elaborate documentation artfully grained into the narrative, that book became a best seller (204,000 copies) in the U. S. when it was translated in 1928, helped win Sigrid Undset the Nobel Prize. But only the most loyal of her admirers were likely to struggle through the long, tedious, devout series of novels laid in the 20th Century (The Burning Bush, The Wild Orchid) that followed. Sigrid Undset's antique figures might come to violent ends, but her unprincipled and purposeless moderns never come to life...
...Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. But Oh! Susanna was not revived by accident. Governor Landon's efficient handlers had searched carefully for a tune to set him to, a tune that could surely be plugged into another Banana Song. After discarding a "We Want Landon" chant and the somewhat tedious Kansas University song, The Crimson and the Blue, the Landonites studied the merits of I Can't Give You Anything but Love, Baby but finally passed it up as dangerous, catchy though the air is. Official campaign words for Oh! Susanna, with their phrases about "regimented Bunk...