Word: commitments
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...vivid physical descriptions and wild poetic fantasy. Reading in part like a travel book, it is at the same time peopled with characters who are all amateur philosophers as well as men of action, who expound their beliefs, analyze themselves and the contemporary world in ringing phrases as they commit murder, double-cross each other, go down racked with disease, vice, unspeakable spiritual torment. Readers may question the allegorical significance of Author Prokosch's tale, may feel that his situations are too farfetched to be credible. But they are likely to admit that his people are real human beings...
...this new biography, the best so far, the biographer sets himself to prove that modern critics who belittle Gibbon's history commit an error equal to Boswell's when he snarled that "Gibbon is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow," or to Dr. Johnson's when that captious fellow club-member implied that it was Gibbon who had ruined Rome. Ingenious as well as admiring, Biographer Low makes no attempt to turn ugly-duckling Gibbon into a swan: the greatness of The Decline and Fall is dramatized more effectively by contrast with the fussy mite...
Meanwhile, Guild members were boring from within. Pundit Walter Lippmann, New York Herald Tribune columnist, wrote a letter to the Guild refusing to pay his dues because he would not commit himself to political opinions adopted by them. New York Guild Secretary Milton Kaufman attempted to straighten him out with the assurance that "individual members of the Guild are no more committed to resolutions of this character than are editorial employes of the Herald Tribune committed to the editorial policy" of that paper. In Seattle 40 Guild members on the Post-Intelligencer, whose publisher is President Roosevelt...
...salesmen, investigates no more than one out of 500 applicants. The Fund does not issue policies for more than $35,000 and the average is around $3,000. Dr. Mackie estimates that the majority of his policyholders earn less than $2,000 a year. Clergymen live long, rarely commit suicide, and, says Dr. Mackie grinning, "darn few preachers are murdered by their wives...
...worried expression of the people on the streets of New York City, their mutterings to themselves. After four years the only asylum habit that clings to him is counting passengers as they get on and off elevators, to make sure none of them has slipped off to commit suicide...