Word: squalor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...World moves fast, beats with excitement. Veteran Crime Novelist W. R. Burnett (Little Caesar; High Sierra) knows the underworld jungle and has a keen ear for its talk. In his study of Arky's misplaced loyalty, he even tries to find some human motive behind the squalor of his story. In the search, he overdoes the idea that most of Arky's hoodlum ways can be explained by a poverty-stricken boyhood. Otherwise, the book is almost as unsentimental as Frank Costello on television...
Actually, The World's Last Corner is a picaresque novel with the juice squeezed out. The traditional picaresque offers a rogue-hero merrily breaking social conventions to rise from squalor to respectability; Plieviers hero, Wenzel, is more victim than rogue - a seafaring, 20th Century Everyman who breaks the laws of society only because he wants...
...husband, young Ericson cannot face responsibility any more than he could as a soldier. Teresa arrives hopefully, finds herself cooped up in squalor with a bitter mother-in-law, and tied to a boy who, unable to keep a job or strike out on his own, is soon reduced again to psychoneurotic panic...
...newly formed London Labor Party (salary: ?1 weekly). Conscientious objector in World War I. Elected to Parliament in 1923, appointed Minister of Transport (1929-31) in Britain's second Labor government. Later (1934-40) became a dynamic leader of the London County Council, concentrated on clearing the Dickensian squalor of London's slums, had notices put up in schools saying: "The teacher may be wrong. Think for yourself...
...admires the tricks which Mongol farmers play on their reluctant soil to make it yield. Yet in a land where there is barely enough to eat, an undernourished girl may have silver rings in her ears. Cammann condenses his impressions of Inner Mongolia into a phrase: "Wealth in squalor...