Word: witnessed
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...CRYSTAL AND A MOTHER? Ellen du Pois Taylor?Harper ($2). It was that pudgy Machiavelli, Author Ben Hecht, who first made Chicago conscious of its exciting capacity for sophisticated wickedness. Mrs. Taylor, sprung from nowhere, will now revive the Hechtic excitement. Her wit and style are surpassingly original. Her treatment of esoteric erotics, from the viewpoint of a hard-boiled young Dakota virgin steeped in French novels, is a wide and pleasant departure from the lucubrations of Mr. Hecht's rather sleazy males. But Mrs. Taylor's actual material is like nothing so much as 17 more chapters...
...reading of The Citizen of the World papers and less credulous perusal of the Hearst papers might have guided this critic of our national failings toward complete triumph. In such a volume as this, the only excuse for its being is found either in clever irony or in scintillating wit. Mr. Joad rarely betrays either. His comment is bold and unrelieved. In discussing broadly the question of American worship of size and narrowly the growth of our large cities, he speaks of the commuter who "spends his half hour not in healthy exercise but in hurtling through the bowels...
...section on Goodness, the author does not fall to include the familiar distribe on the passion in America for proyphylactic cleanliness. It is not extraordinary that our land of prohibitions both legal and moral, provides tantalizing stimulus for any sensitive observer, be he yokel or diplomat, foreigner or native wit. In this portion of the book alone does the author play the game he has chosen for though fairry adroit satire pinch-hits for the more rugged sincerity which any critical work presupposes he nevertheless concludes his observations in more commendable fashion than he approached his unfamiliar subject...
...many students, if any, were beguiled by the appeliation of "cultured young American" into answering the questionnaires anent the modern girl sent out recently by a New York daily, will never be known; nor what heights of wit were reached by the frivolous minded. The whole absurd business, however, marks still more plainly a phenomenon of the last few years; a persistent attempt on the part of certain newspapers and magazines to "play up" the life of the college student. A college suicide, a fatal automobile accident involving an undergraduate is featured in headlines worthy of a declaration...
Rome despatches, carefully censored, told no names. But in the shrewd reply, a smack of the old wit of white-haired Cardinal-Bishop Vincenzo Vannutelli, 91-year old Dean of the Sacred College, might be seen. Or, others guessed, of Cardinal-Bishop Gaetano de Lai, as famed for apt reply as sharp-tongued Irish divine. Dean Swift...