Word: vividness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...beauty of its vivid-hued cliffs and luminous Blue Grotto, Italy's fabled Bay of Naples island of Capri owes its reputation less to its scenery than to two of its former inhabitants. One was the Emperor Tiberius, who retired some 1,900 years ago to a mountaintop villa from which, records Suetonius, "condemned persons, after long and exquisite tortures, used to be hurled, on his orders and in his presence, into the sea." The other was British Author Norman Douglas, whose bestselling South Wind (1917) painted a thinly disguised picture of Capri as a haunt of elegant wickedness...
Died. George Grosz, 65, artist who savagely satirized Germany's feverish society between the world wars, with a contorted line drew bloated military and businessmen and their writhing wire-thin victims, relied on his own vivid experience in World War I trenches to depict human beings oozing into animal-like forms under the pressures of war, derided the Nazis so devastatingly from the appearance of the first swastika that Hitler labeled him "Cultural Bolshevist No. 1 and featured him prominently in the 1937 Munich exhibition of degenerate art; of a heart attack; in Berlin. Grosz fled...
...which Duluoz leaves Lowell, Mass., as Kerouac did, to play football for Columbia. Both books are written in the author's customary form, which is to say, utter formlessness. But while the disjointed episodes of Doctor Sax added up-after a number of sizable subtractions-to a vivid picture of mill-town childhood, the gush of recollection in Maggie Cassidy soon becomes just one undammed thing after another...
...only reasonable competition being The Glass Menagerie. Sure it contains all the "sick" elements that have become so exhaustively familiar in his more recent work--the mendacity, the liquor, the sex-starved woman, the stud male, and so on. But the most distinctive characteristics of Williams' writing are his vivid and powerful command of language and his fascinating use of rhythmic speech patterns--sometimes lyric, sometimes syncopated like a primitive drum...
...artist v. society, love v. vocation, honor v. survival, but her hero is not big enough to embody these dilemmas. His conscience is not so much troubled as missing. Still, her book is a feast of the visual imagination. Herself the wife of a painter, she stipples Praise with vivid vignettes. And when it comes to dialogue, her ear is as good as her eye. Author de Lima raises a storm, all right, even if it is only a tempest in an espresso...