Word: wars
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Louis neighborhood in 1919. An Irish-American mother, on the lower rungs of the middle class, and her four daughters are sweating out an August vigil for the sole son and brother, waiting for him to come back from service in World War...
Forty years ago, when people still cried at tearjerkers, it would have made a great movie. A cheeky kid becomes the country's top box office draw, goes off to war, comes back and discovers that nobody loves a 30-year-old brat. He spends too much, drinks too much and wives too much. At the studios, they don't even know his name, except as a joke. He gets older, paunchier and balder, but though few seem to know it, he is still one of the best actors in the business. Then he finds himself...
...both Russians and Americans, the supreme symbol of the Soviet Union at war was the "Leningrad" Symphony, Dmitri Shostakovich's Seventh. In 1942, when Arturo Toscanini and the NBC orchestra performed it on radio for the first time in America, the New York Times music critic remarked that "the ballyhoo has never been surpassed in history for the scope of the publicity and the distribution of the music." In the U.S.S.R., performances of the symphony were said to have exerted "a profound influence on the psyche of the Soviet people in the struggle against the Nazi invader...
...Seventh Symphony, he says, was planned in his head before the war; the so-called invasion theme, with its fearsomely swelling fortissimo, has nothing to do with the Nazi attack. "I was thinking of other enemies of humanity [namely Stalin and his killers] when 1 composed the theme." His Fifth Symphony, which established Shostakovich's reputation in the Soviet Union, was meant to describe Stalin's Great Terror of 1936-37. In the post-Stalin era, his Thirteenth Symphony was intended as a protest against antiSemitism, and his Fourteenth was an evocation of the horrors of the Gulag...
...radicalism advanced in the decade, he began to have his doubts. He was an early opponent of the Viet Nam War, but he did not agree with his fellow intellectuals that the conflict was an indictment of the American political system...