Word: unreal
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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British officials who interrogated Hess found him hopelessly saturated with Nazi propaganda. If Hess could be taken as accurate evidence, even top-rank Nazis lived in the unreal world their propaganda had created...
...notes tell me that I am reporting only what I saw or verified; yet even to me it seems unreal: dogs eating human bodies by the roads, peasants seeking dead human flesh under the cover of darkness, endless deserted villages, beggars swarming at every city gate, babies abandoned to cry and die on every highway. Nothing can transmit the horror of the entire great famine in Honan Province, or the irony of the green spring wheat with a promise of a bumper crop which is not ripe for harvesting for two more months. Most terrible of all is the knowledge...
Saroyan shapes such moments in words of almost primer lucidity. Among his still-pursuing faults are glints of Tarkingtonian facetiousness, sometimes boring and unreal sententiousness, excessive sentiment. His essential limitation-which is also his cardinal virtue-is perhaps incurable. That is his chronic ecstasy, his almost Franciscan loving kindness and optimism. It clearly transfigures the world for him and, for a time, is bound to. transfigure any sympathetic reader. Saroyan is one of the few contemporary writers who can articulate, in terms of common life, the indispensable text, Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall...
Worthless as a picture of war, Counterattack does not quite make the grade as an out-&-out thriller. It has goose-fleshy twists, but some of it is too old-fashioned and most of it is too unreal...
...many ways Billy De Beck lived a life as unreal as the comic-strip characters he fathered. When he was at high school in Chicago he drew imitation Charles Dana Gibson pictures, peddled them for profit. He did cartoons for a theatrical weekly and for several newspapers. But he stayed poor until he turned out a correspondence course on "How to be a cartoonist and make big money." He sold thousands of copies for $1 apiece. He was doing a so-so successful strip, "Married Life," for the Chicago Herald at $35 a week when King Features hired...