Word: arendt
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This is not the "banality of evil," as Hannah Arendt described Eichmann's bureaucratic Final Solution. The photographs present, rather, a sort of festivity of evil. Well dressed white people - the men in jaunty straw boaters, the women in pretty Sunday dresses, the children (children!) neat as a pin - are posed as they inspect mutilated and naked black corpses. People have brought picnic baskets. The pictures were sent as postcards through the mail...
...splendid cast of characters--starting with McCarthy's Partisan Review crowd of the 1930s and '40s (Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Delmore Schwartz and Dwight Macdonald), then widening to include other figures in McCarthy's busy, contentious life, including Wilson, whom she called "the monster," her unexpected soul mate Hannah Arendt and dozens of gifted walk-ons, such as Robert Lowell and Isaiah Berlin. And of course there is McCarthy's archenemy, Lillian Hellman. In a taped interview with Dick Cavett, first aired in 1980, McCarthy said, with only slight hyperbole, that "every word she writes is is a lie, including...
Also on the list are Hildegarde of Bingen, Teresa of Avila, Catherine de Medici, Anne Boleyn, Joan of Arc, Abigail Adams, Emily Bronte, Harriet Tubman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, Hannah Arendt, Sarah Caldwell, Martha Graham and Toni Morrison...
...Family, politics defined personalities. If one's politics went wrong, friendships might die unpleasant deaths. In Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer (Free Press; 244 pages; $25), Podhoretz, 69, has set down a fierce and gossipy record of his expired relationships. His stories amount to a personal diary of American political ideas from the end of World War II to the present...
...bitchy, earthy, and always up for a laugh." But her extraordinary lies (the "Julia" story, for example) and her habit of self-glorification--herself presented as saint and martyr in the memoirs An Unfinished Woman, Scoundrel Time and elsewhere--were to Podhoretz symptoms of corruption and dishonor. Podhoretz admired Arendt but eventually broke with her over her famous New Yorker articles on the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961 and, as Podhoretz saw it, her seeming lack of sympathy for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust...