Word: tinsel
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...store from the children and is in turn captured by a onetime countergirl whom Freddie Pardway seduced. There are power and sweep to Sweepings (the title comes from old Daniel's pennyscrimping examinations of the store's daily refuse, in the odd socks, ravelings, scraps and broken tinsel of which he finally recognizes his children). Its rapid motion is even, sure. Yet in all the 447 pages, times are penetrated as seldom as people; the pictures of Chicago's Board of Trade, her restaurants, clubs, night joints, aristocratic lakefront and booming South Side are superficial, gaudy pictures...
...seasoned with color and music, harmoniously staged. The same romantically inclined folk will overlook, in the general glamor, a turbulent succession of flat puns and desperate buffoonery. They will even forgive the unfortunate costume foisted upon handsome Songster Walter Woolf in the third act. They will thrill to the tinsel, to the song "Play "Gypsies", to the do-re-mi of routine musical comedy efficiently produced...
...grave, patrician gentleman, with a bland hand and a judicial eye. His name is the only exclamatory thing about him. He presents an assurance of stability, a hint of qualities that take capitals, an implication of old-worldness, of principles, even, that seem oddly exotic in a world where tinsel is the mode. Manager Wiley was inevitably destined by nature to be the associate of Publisher Ochs. Two such opposites could never have kept apart. They would have been an irresistible vaudeville team, courtly, Ochs feeding gag-lines to impish Wiley; they would have made a handy pair of tumblers...
...History is what men have tacitly agreed shall be the truth." So commented a recent critic, and doubtless the scribe's Midas-fingers do convert much tinsel into gold. Yet, occasionally, there is no need for alchemy. James Amps, for many years closely associated with Theodore Roosevelt as butler, valet, "head-man," recently in Collier's sketched an intimate portrait of the Colonel's last days. The President had been a jovial man. He would tell a story of how he had loaned $200 to a "Rough Rider" friend to pay a lawyer for his defense after...
...supply one in the career of Alan, the hero. What it comes down to is a series of sordid affairs strung together with a certain deftness which is hardly compelling. In flashers, Mr. Woolrich's characters stand out in three dimensions. For the most part, however, they remain the tinsel marionnettes which the author undoubtedly intended them to be in order to gain his distorted effects. He tries to be surprising and clever in his use of words and situations but he too often descends to sheer stupidity like this...