Word: vivid
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Three terse, vivid pages of description open the novel and set the scene. The main factory of Elmdown Aircraft Co. Ltd. comprises acres of windowless con crete camouflaged in a misty hollow in the South Midlands, ten miles from the nearest town. Says Priestley, "take away these drawing offices, these toolmakers' sheds, these long rows of machines, these workers on assembly, and within ten days the whip is at your back. All the brave, drilled men, willing to rush toward death, all the flags and national anthems, all the patriotic speeches, cannot rescue a people now. Without such factories...
...actress, an old friend, and learns that he cannot write a play. His elder son, Jim, quits Harvard to join the army and marry a girl Madge does not approve. But on these bare bones Marquand has molded the flesh of Jeffrey Wilson's memories, turns them into vivid, detailed, often moving episodic stories. So skilfully does Marquand recapture the mood of middle-class U.S. life during the last 35 years that most readers will overlook the artificiality of the flashback technique...
...Newman's job is often complicated by his patients' primitive rituals: he still occasionally finds scissors, hatchets and axes under their beds "to cut the pains" (a superstition something like a horseshoe over the door). But his most vivid memory, which often returns to him strangely in the midst of a delivery, is "the smell and sound of an old hog scratching his back on the sills beneath the floor" during a birth...
Montgomery's was almost an invisible operation, so fast did he move, so meagerly was the Eighth's progress reported. Most of the vivid news from Sicily came from the southwest, where the U.S. Seventh Army had landed. Only the Eighth's Canadians, advancing at the center of the entire invasion front, were thoroughly reported in the first eleven days, and they fumed because they had so little fighting...
Torpedo 8, fruit of NANA Correspondent Ira Wolfert's three-month stay in the South Pacific, is a report of U.S. air fighting in the Solomons. Terse and nerve-tingling, the book communicates the stab-&-run violence of aerial battle with a verbal violence as calculated and vivid as an explosion...