Word: bits
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this book," he says, explaining his willingness to go on the road. "I do feel I'm entering some self-replicating white space, where the distinction between working and living has been erased." Reminded of what happened--of what he made happen--to Bill Gray, DeLillo laughs, a bit uneasily...
...Psychology, that doorstop of a book--what Professor William James had written...and which I'd fought my way through...") Teddy Roosevelt, as before, is a bully minor character, though here he is Assistant Secretary of the Navy, not New York City police commissioner. And in a brilliant bit of historical casting, Clarence Darrow, a rising courtroom wizard from Chicago, turns up to confound the good guys and defend the villain at a tense upstate New York murder trial...
Darrow's client is a serial-killing woman who has murdered several adults and a large number of children, including at least three of her own. And here is where the plot seems a bit askew. As in real life, Darrow is a passionate death-penalty opponent. If he loses, his thoroughly guilty client goes to the electric chair. Just deserts aside, the novel has clip-clopped along too jocularly for too many chapters for this to be an acceptable outcome. Well, can the child killer go free? Perish forbid. Therefore...
...novel psychological theories of the great (and imaginary) psychiatrist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler seem a bit further from the center of things here than they did in The Alienist. True, he affronts received opinion by postulating that a woman, because of her treatment in childhood, may be quite capable of murdering her own children and those of others. He helps trap the woman he has described. But for the trial to go forward he must declare her sane, a judgment that would have seemed as mushy at the beginning of the Freudian era as it does now. For a long stretch...
...prearrangement, he left packets of $100 bills in office-building lobbies or airport luggage lockers. He was obliged to make so many phone calls from public booths that he finally took to wearing a bus driver's coin changer... At first, committee members treated Ulasewicz as a welcome bit of comic relief. "Who thought you up?'' asked Tennessee Senator Howard Baker. "I don't know," replied a startled Ulasewicz. "Maybe my parents...