Word: deathly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that he could give little credit to the ideas of others; so inept in business matters that he lost control of the immensely profitable companies he founded. An incurable show-off and self-promoter who circulated so many myths about his personality and accomplishments that 48 years after his death historians are still struggling to separate legend from fact...
...politics, the women's movement, the moon program. He tries it now upon another American public event that possessed, even before he wrote about it, a certain Mailerian quality: the execution, early in 1977, of Gary Gilmore, 36, a Utah murderer who refused to appeal his conviction and death sentence and demanded that the state kill him. Utah obliged, but only after a ritual that turned Gilmore into a grotesque celebrity. Shortly before the prisoner was seated in front of a dirty mattress to face the firing squad, ABC-TV's Geraldo Rivera was screaming into his mike...
Mailer is the last and no doubt the most intelligent participant in the complicated travesty of Gilmore's death. The writer has mobilized a shrewdness to match Gilmore's own punkish daring and jailhouse self-abnegation. Old Aquarius has silenced his bustling, manic, intrusive voice. His prose in this thousand-page trek is a Conestoga of American plain style: it is banal, idiomatic and somehow grainy, like the scenes in 1950s pornographic films in which the characters meet and part like neighborhood dogs, the men never taking their socks...
...flat, banal voices mustered here soon become haunting. The book is like an immense issue of the National Enquirer being endlessly explicated until it is forced to yield some truth. Gilmore's story is a sort of immense white-trash saga; he accomplishes his victory even in death by calling down all kinds of electronic gods to attend: photographers, wire services, television networks, and at last even the bardic Mailer. No one else has so well caught the logic by which small creeps become celebrities, even when they entertain us with their doom...
Arens' theory arrives at a time when cannibalism is a hot topic in the academic world. Some sociobiologists believe it is evidence of man's inherent aggressiveness. Anthropologists are busy classifying different kinds of cannibalism, or depicting it as a ritualistic denial of death-the victim lives on by being incorporated as food. Columbia Anthropologist Marvin Harris (Cannibals and Kings) is a strict materialist who argues that cannibalism was a near universal practice made necessary by a scarcity of protein...