Word: uppers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...comes equipped with iron will and brass nerve. But Social Psychologists Helen Beier and Raymond Bauer, two members of a Harvard team that interviewed several hundred Soviet refugees, believe that the much-touted toughness is often a thin veneer, particularly among the "Golden Youth" of the new Soviet upper classes. In The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Beier and Bauer present a case history: 30-year-old Oleg, an intellectual who fled to the West...
Oleg, say the Harvard psychologists, is essentially one of the stereotypes of czarist days: the ambitious but passive dreamer. The Soviet upper class is acquiring the same sheltered, privileged life as the czarist nobility. If present trends continue, the ranks of the Red aristocracy will be filled with more and more green-tinged Golden Youths like Oleg...
Author Wouk is at his best when he pictures the rarely described world of Manhattan's Upper West Side, which one of his characters calls the "gilded ghetto." Wouk knows its customs, prejudices, social gradations, e.g., West End Avenue is a worse address than Central Park West; mothers run a secret service on eligible suitors as efficiently as any conducted in Junior League territory. Most amusing and effective are Wouk's accounts of big family occasions, e.g., the mammoth bar mitzvah* with its ostentatious but somehow touching banquet that finds Marjorie's brother making a grand entrance...
...played by rising Manhattan Pianist Charles Rosen. Although the piano's origin is closer to Mozart's day than Scarlatti's, the gem-pure Scarlatti pieces are more effectively unveiled. Through Pianist Rosen's subtle fingers-and the piano's remarkable characteristics-the piquant upper lines take on the diamond-point clarity of a harpsichord, while the sonatas' lower notes emerge with something like a modern piano's warmer, darker mass of tone. The total effect is a fusion of contrasting elements into a near-perfect whole...
...nervous movie, he shifts the scene to a shattered village where hysterical Italians watched a British private thumping out Moonlight Becomes You on a piano in the smoking ruins. Near by, a Gurkha battalion had established its GHQ without bothering to check for snipers in the upper room. A British officer sent his aide to inspect the attic, and when the Gurkha returned, Johnston recorded this conversation...