Word: torquemada
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...TORQUEMADA by Howard Fast 192 pages. Doubleday...
...Torquemada, Howard Fast has reached back 500 years to compose a bitter fictional parable about one of the most detested figures in the history of man or of man's religion-the Dominican Friar Thomas de Torquemada, Prior of Segovia and Grand Inquisitor of Spain. Or so it seems. A parable illuminates a complexity with a single truth. Fast's is a terrible, simple tale which raises more complex questions than it provides simple answers...
...anti-Semitic holocaust. Thomas' hatred is not for Jews (who, he thinks, are damned anyway) but for the marrano, the converted Jew who might secretly practice Jewish rites. Fatally, Don Alvero is such a one, or could be mistaken for one by malice and fanaticism. And so, Torquemada puts his friend to the torture. Alvero's own wife repudiates him as a Jew, and while he is recovering from torture, his daughter is immolated in a fire that burns the ancient synagogue of Segovia. Thomas gives Alvero his freedom in exchange for the girl's sacrifice...
...drama style minus costume-designed to give somnambulistic inevitability to the dreadful action. The hypnotic effect may not take in some readers who will be irritated by the tones of an adult careful not to use big words to a low-IQ child. Moreover, Fast's publishers call Torquemada a tour de force; it could also be a sleight of hand. How it is read probably depends on how much the reader knows of history, not excluding the history of Howard Fast...
Berbers Wanted. The network was CBS. There, CBS-TV President James T. Aubrey Jr. is the supreme judge. As Miller draws him, he is a kind of pretty Torquemada. It was Aubrey who conceived the county agent series one day when he leaned back, closed his eyes, and murmured: "I see a man in a dusty pickup in the Southwest." Corporate peasants were left to do the rest, for Aubrey is no writer, just a would-be writer, as Miller describes him. And would-be writers "are like eunuchs in a harem. They see the trick done every night...