Word: mindlessness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...story in this book, Bonin Islands, about a fight between Pacific sealers and island natives, evokes a youthful, innocent hunger for strange places and, at the same time, a kind of mindless, hallucinatory quality. Yet it tells of real events that happened when young London, at 16, shipped on a sealer to the islands. After three years of kicking about the Pacific, he returned to the U.S. and, thirsting for knowledge, enrolled as a freshman at Oakland High School. The student literary journal, Aegis, published his Bonin Islands story, and its stay-at-home readers must have been awed...
...opera, a triumph of bel canto, and it does have magnificent vocal passages, notably two duets for the two leading female singers. But (as Bernard Shaw once said of the young Verdi) Bellini's orchestra sounds like a giant guitar; it plinkety-plinks through embarrassing military airs, mindless rages and cloying romances...
...Arthur Kober. Abraham is a patriarch in the classic mold-huge, fork-bearded, devout. When two of his sons are mur dered in a pogrom, he flees from the Ukraine to Canada. The tragedy briefly robs Abraham of his faith in God, turns his wife Sarah into a mindless zombie, and weighs down the frail shoulders of his remaining son, Isaac, with the necessity of making up for the loss of his talented brothers...
...well on its way to hell in a hand basket. Its leaders are morally bankrupt ("America is indeed without leaders"); its people are whipped around by TV and public-relations types and have almost nothing to do with deciding their political fate. Its rich are vulgar and mindless, its poor too gutless to do anything about their condition; its labor leaders impotent fellows and "government-made men." U.S. generals and admirals are "warlords" who pursue their dreadful projects in the mazes of the Pentagon with a total disregard for what the citizenry thinks or wants...
...conviction that he smells something-perhaps not a plot, but surely a tacit and cynical understanding among the big-corporation heads, the "warlords" and the "very rich" to take the country away from the common man. This is big; this is cold, naked power wielded by mindless giants who make life-and-death decisions without moral or intellectual regard for the consequences. Success no longer matters, because to achieve success today is to admit one's moral bankruptcy. And men no longer really make the grade: they are hand-picked by corporations who tell them what they want...