Word: tucker
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...familiar names, and in the pit was Fausto Cleva, veteran of the Met's Italian wing. But on this routine occasion the audience was treated to a beautifully sung, splendidly paced evening for which much of the credit went to two middle-aged American singers named Warren and Tucker...
Twenty years or so ago, Bronx-born Leonard Warren (né Warrenoff) was busy selling fur jackets and studying advertising at Columbia, and Brooklyn-born Richard (originally Reuben) Tucker was selling dyed silk linings to the wholesale fur trade. Baritone Warren turned to singing (he won the 1938 Metropolitan Auditions of the Air) when the Depression shrank the fur business; Tenor Tucker turned to singing when the outbreak of World War II shrank the silk supply. Both advanced quickly in the war-hobbled Metropolitan, both quickly became reliable, stock-in-trade singers. In recent years they have blossomed into spectacular...
...cult of death is the other side of the cult of life, as the Hemingway people's worship of the bull ring suggests (it was perhaps no real mistake in identity when, Lael Tucker notes with pleasure, her husband once was mistaken for "Papa" Hemingway at Spain's Pamplona ring). And so a story that is often deeply moving is also overlaid with words and gestures that have the air of gruesome parody, as when Lael Tucker says to her husband in the last moments: "I love you I love you please die." Or when Wertenbaker with...
...says ("tightly") by way of farewell: "You make me want to write!" and adds in a letter: "My dear, calm friend! . . . You are noble . . . You manage to make a kind of dance of it." Not all will want to follow the last steps of the dreadful dance, when Lael Tucker's second husband (whom she divorced to marry Wertenbaker) visits the dying man and sitting before the fire says: "You are the best . . . Tell me what you want...
...Lael Tucker pleads a moral cause: a kind of private euthanasia, her husband's "right to die as he wished to, when he chose." She knows that this claim is based on pride: several times during the last painful months, the Wertenbakers gaily toasted what they called their hubris, a word which they thought defined their own gallant pagan defiance of fate. Each reader will have to judge the moral issue for himself; the real significance lies in the fact that, in this book, the issue is only seen in terms of responsibility to oneself and to other human...