Word: bleake
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...Along a bleak stretch of the southeastern shore of Alaska, the country is blanketed by parts of three glaciers. Heavy snows fall in winter; during the summer torrential rams pour down. In that spot last week, Phillips Petroleum Co. chose to go wildcatting for oil, the first major effort of a private company. Phillips' handsome chance-taking Chairman Kenneth Stanley ("Boots") Adams, 53, thinks it is a sporting proposition largely because signs of oil have been found there by seepages and in icebergs from the area. Under Adams Phillips has built a reputation in tne oil business...
...curtain call, Williams bows deeply to the book before him. But though the words he reads are Dickens', it is also Williams' skill as an editor and actor which makes Bleak House an unusual and fascinating performance...
...Williams recreates a dignified and genteel era. His copy of Block House is on the red velvet reading stand only for the sake of appearance, since Williams recites unfalteringly his adaptation of the bulky novel. Rearranging and shortening the stands of the initiate plot. Williams presents a version of Bleak House which the listener can follow with case and pleasure...
...Bleak House is Dickens' crusade against the British Court of Chancery which often dragged its lawsuits throughout several generations. Modeled on an actual twenty-year case, his suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce is so old it has become "the death of many, but a joke in the legal profession." Caught in this slow judicial mill is a dewy orphan, Esther Summerson, and a bushelful of broadly caricatured eccentrics. Dickens loses his lightly ironic tone only when he drenches little Jo, the street sweeper, in compassion. Even here Williams is superb; he thunders the author's tearful commentary with a gusto...
Manhattan's galleries were off to a flying 1953 start with some 30 new shows open last week. Gallerygoers could choose to see almost anything from mild Bermuda landscapes to bleak views of the Arctic or carvings from the Congo. But the standout exhibition was home-town work: 119 paintings by two Greenwich Village women who rank among the top U.S. artists. Both are considered abstractionists, but the term covers a lot of ground and their paintings are as different as cumulus and calculus...