Word: defenselessness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...insiders heard it, the invaders were going to seize five ports, border towns and airfields near them. From these bases, planes would bomb Costa Rica's defenseless capital, San José. Women in the capital would be stirred up by fifth columnists to parade hysterically to the presidential residence and demand that Figueres resign, to spare his country. His enemies hoped that he would then lose his nerve and turn over his government to a rebel junta...
...LADY, by Cothburn O'Neal (313 pp.; Crown; $3.50). A quaint "theory" about who really wrote Shakespeare's plays: it was a woman, Rosaline de Vere, illegitimate daughter of the Earl of Oxford. What with the prejudice of the day and Rose's being a poor defenseless bit of a thing, Actor Will obligingly markets the plays with the Globe Theatre and signs his name to them. Rose meanwhile dashes off a great many billets-doux in the form of very quotable sonnets to her true love, the Earl of Southampton. The book is clearly marked...
Cathedral Hush. Everything following might be expected to be anticlimactic, but Berlioz achieves perhaps his greatest effects in the quieter passages that grip the heart after all the thunder. The superb Sanctus calls for a tenor solo in which, by a dazzling piece of orchestration, the single, defenseless human voice is set off against the relentless clash of cymbals; and in the sweet, concluding Agnus Dei, there are chilling traces of jagged pagan rhythms (later used by Stravinsky). Conductor Munch tenderly and forcefully drove toward the end, spinning out the Amen with a loving final touch. A cathedral hush hung...
Intent to Kill. The Skymaster's dying radioman got off an S O S; then the defenseless British airliner flamed out of the sky, flattened out and slid onto the water. Nine persons including an American father and his two sons, aged two and four years, sank with the plane; nine survived on a life raft...
Daphne du Maurier, 46, is one of the slickest pros now producing bestseller belles-lettres. She dips her pen into the inkpot of romance, melodrama or suspense and aims it like a dagger at the heart of the defenseless reader, who is usually quite willing to hold still...