Word: weaponed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
COCKSURE, by Mordecai Richler. Satirist Richler's basic weapon is seductio ad absurdum in this stylish spoof of the communications industry and pop culture...
Another minister, the Rev. C. Edward Thompson, 43, of New Kensington, Pa., stood atop the bunker, lifted his hands and cried out for mercy. A fusillade from a Communist automatic weapon killed him; his wife died moments later when the North Vietnamese sprayed the inside of the bunker with small-arms fire. On leaving the mission, the Reds kidnaped another American nurse, Miss Betty Olsen, 32, and Henry Blood of Portland, Ore., a member of the Wycliffe Bible Translators...
Richler's basic weapon is the mace of reductio ad absurdum, which he wields with skill and ferocity. A publisher compiles a book that documents little acts of kindness shown by the Nazis toward Jews, and holds a benefit dinner for wives and children of deceased concentration-camp guards; a school play casts ten-year-olds in a staging of Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom; a teacher encourages the academic achievement of her boy students by rewarding them in an entirely extracurricular manner; a nun appearing on a Joe Pyne-style TV insult program is publicly reduced...
...immense satisfaction of going back to work-at the higher wages they had demanded-for the private contractor to whom the commission had let the new refuse-collection contract. Amid such contradictions, organized public workers are increasingly taking the position that collective bargaining is meaningless without the ultimate weapon of the strike which, used or not, brings gains to private employees...
...than newsprint and printing-labor cost," he wrote in his final issue. He added that he has also been losing his readership. "To the generation that succeeded mine, stories about the Lower East Side are like stories about the moon." Nor does he feel that wit is the useful weapon it once was. "The fight for civil rights has lost its romance," he wrote. "There is nothing funny about it any more...