Word: drama
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Lost Boundaries (Film Classics), first published as a real-life drama in Reader's Digest, described the tragic dilemma of a fair-skinned Negro family in a small New England town who for years had "passed" as whites. The father was a prosperous doctor and a pillar of the community, the mother an active worker in civic affairs. The children, unaware of their antecedents, were normal, happy-go-lucky American school kids-until the day their father, whose secret had been exposed by U.S. naval intelligence, told them the truth. From there on, they became in their own minds...
...Bismarck Episode is a retired British naval officer's remarkably lucid account of the pursuit, cornering and sinking of the pride of Hitler's navy. An author of less background might have pulled out all the stops and wallowed happily but confusingly in the story's drama. Author Grenfell,* veteran of 30 years' service, including the Jutland and Dardanelles actions in World War I, sticks sternly to facts and understatement...
...actor in the shifting cast is the judge. None of the others even try to memorize lines. Instead, they are rehearsed over & over in incidents gathered from court stenographers, judges, police reporters, detectives and the files of the Better Business Bureau. Lord encourages them to act out the basic drama in their own words...
Readers will find here, gleaming oddly in its transplanted setting, the pattern of the classical Greek drama which was Author Compton-Burnett's favorite reading as a child. Like Sophocles' Oedipus, struggling to gauge the future and discovering that it twists horribly back into his own past, the characters in Two Worlds march blindly to their fate, doomed from the start but always demanding, with the eloquence and dignity of Aeschylean heroes, their right to respect as well as humiliation. They always get plenty of both from Ivy Compton-Burnett...
...Stars Look Down. When Goethe was born in Frankfurt in 1749, German music was already entering its day of unparalleled glory (Bach, Handel and Haydn were living, Mozart and Beethoven were soon to come); by comparison, German poetry and drama were blank pages. "Had I been born an Englishman," Goethe once confessed, "and had all those numerous masterpieces (of Shakespeare's) been brought before me ... they would have overpowered me, and I should not have known what...