Word: tone
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Cabrera's pessimism and deadpan ironic tone cement these vignettes into a book. Whether he is describing some feat of unbelievable bravery, such as peasants armed only with machetes attacking a Spanish cavalry unit, or some remarkable complacency or quite ordinary cowardice, he always deflates heroic claims that men control their destinies. Battles are planned with elaborate strategy and won by blind chance. So many of these images are both horrible and accidentally funny that they finally detach the reader from any feeling but irony...
...slapstick tragedy is not the only reason why people are watching Mary Hartman. The show's fascination lies in its oddly shifting tone. Almost all of the characters are confused. Mary herself is usually slack-jawed with bafflement-about her sister, who has fallen in with the local massage-parlor king; her grandfather, "the Fernwood Flasher"; and most of all by her stolid and truly enigmatic husband Tom. Though he is having an affair with Mae, a comely co-worker at the plant, he is impotent with Mary. The situation makes him terse and glum...
DeGaetani's tone in her low register has an eerie, mysterious quality which reflects the ambiguous and sinister tests by Stefan George. Her upper register however is just plain ugly. When she goes above the staff, she sounds as if she were struggling to free herself from someone clutching at her throat. Fortunately, she doesn't have to go there too often and her performance remains sensitive and dramatic if not always beautiful...
There is, however, one other group of people that he is close to, at least for the run of their cases: his clients. "He gets too close to his clients," complains a colleague. There is a big-brother tone of genuine concern when he talks about the infamous men he has defended. On the other hand, once a trial is over, Bailey is characteristically the first man out of the courtroom...
...story of master spies and code cracking was first unraveled last year in Frederick Winterbotham's The Ultra Secret. But Brown has newer intelligence and a stronger moral tone. According to his evidence, Winston Churchill, mindful of the "dull carnage" of World War I, was receptive when the pale geniuses of Oxford and Cambridge proposed "special means"-plans which often resembled the schemes of undergraduates to outwit proctors...