Word: vost
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...back up the hype, earning her a global following. Since 1997, her greatest hits album has sold over 4 million copies, half of them outside France. "That's a kind of international recognition that today's French-language artists just don't achieve," says Cécile Prévost-Thomas, a sociologist specializing in French song. Piaf's success abroad reminds the country of a time when its cultural exports could achieve popularity while remaining defiantly French. The passing of that era is lamented amid the proliferation of American Idol?style reality shows and young French stars singing...
...passion that has increasingly dominated Hawkes' recent books (The Blood Oranges, Travesty) is sex; The Passion Artist, his eighth novel, dwells still more obsessively on this subject. The title begins in irony. Konrad Vost is neither passionate nor an artist but rather an epitome of timid rationality. Hawkes stresses his hero's stylized anonymity, his "small perfectly round gold-rimmed spectacles, his two ill-fitting suits of black serge, his black turtleneck shirts, his pointed shoes that were always worn at the heels and covered with a faint dusting of powdered concrete from the walls of unfinished buildings...
...Kafkaesque. But Vost's prissy, virginal middle age is soon disrupted. He accidentally learns that his daughter is a prostitute; catatonically, he submits to the ministrations of one of Mirabelle's schoolmates before going off to report his daughter to the police. When the women of La Violaine stage a revolt, Vost is among the volunteers who enter the prison, armed with long sticks, and try to beat the women into submission. They fail, and Vost embarks on a nightmare journey over the terrain of lust...
...French von Braun" for his invention of the guided SSII missile, he masterminded both Petit-Clamart and an earlier attempt in which a napalm and plastique bomb was planted on the route to Colombey. De Gaulle commuted the death sentences of two other Petit-Clamart conspirators, Jacques Prévost and Alain Bougrenet de la Tocnaye. But he refused to grant clemency to Bastien-Thiry, reportedly because the attempt had been made when Mme. de Gaulle was also in the car. He was executed by a firing squad March...
...Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry heard the sentence impassively, but flinched when the judge added that he would be expelled from the Légion d'Honneur; ex-Lieut. Alain Bougrenet de la Tocnaye was equally impassive as he stood at attention in his army uniform; Jacques Prévost, whose life had not even been demanded by the prosecution, heard the death sentence with a slight smile. Sentences for the six other defendants ranged from three years to life imprisonment...