Word: magic
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Four days off our Atlantic Coast lies the Island of Black Magic, peopled and civilized by the decendents of Negro slaves. This book recounts the adventures of an American who went to Haiti becaused he sensed its mystery...
...Each act was clipped short, the curtain falling just before the audience had reached the climax of enjoyment. Second, the music was exuberant, explosive, punctuated by the hearty (not dainty) shrieks of pretty feminine performers. Lastly, there was a transcendent originality. Two years ago, even one year ago, this magic quality lingered on. Last week, however, it was seen to have finally evaporated, a fault all the more glaring because every number in the present program is new, in the sense of not having been shown before...
...MAGIC ISLAND-W. B. Seabrook- Harcourt, Brace ($3.50). ". . . in the red light of torches which made the moon turn pale, leaping, screaming, writhing black bodies, blood-maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened, drunken, whirled and danced their dark saturnalia, heads thrown weirdly back as if their necks were broken, white teeth and eyeballs gleaming, while couples seizing one another from time to time fled from the circle, as if pursued by furies, into the forest to share and slake their ecstasy." Author Seabrook understood the totality of this abandon following as it did upon ceremonial Voodoo rites of purification. He himself...
...Judas and Pontius Pilate in effigy. Author Seabrook records these matters with a humble sympathy rather than the traditional amused condescension. His humor he reserves for black naivetés, his condescension for white stupidities. The result is a thoroughly fascinating Voodoo document, interspersed with comic relief. The "Magic Island" is Haiti, four days off the Atlantic Coast...
Attorney General in President Coolidge's cabinet is John Garibaldi Sargent, huge, rustic, wise friend and onetime neighbor of Mr. Coolidge in Vermont. His first assistant is kinetic Col. William J. ("Wild Bill") Donovan, who last week whisked away from magic Washington to New Mexico, there to wrestle with the Mexican boundary problem. He went happy, gay and debonair because a little bird had told him he would be Attorney General when, soon, Vermonters Coolidge and Sargent had retired into history. Though nothing more than a bird would stand sponsor for this piquant prediction...