Word: evil
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Serb fairy tales often revolve around the story of an evil wizard who can be defeated only by finding his hidden source of power and destroying it. Modern Serbia has no shortage of wicked sorcerers who fit that archetype, and first among them is Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. In the late 1980s Milosevic loosed chaos upon the former Yugoslavia by conjuring up the ghosts of Balkan nationalism. The four years of war that followed dismembered the country, killed some 100,000 civilians and turned the President into an international pariah. Within Serbia, however, his iron rule remained unchallenged--until last...
Perilously close to evil and most of all, it inconveniences...
...years later, was forced to resign, a step ahead of the Senate's tar and feathers. Lyndon Johnson's great victory in 1964 over Barry Goldwater did not make L.B.J., strictly speaking, a second-termer (his "first term" was the unexpired part of John Kennedy's), but the evil eye fell on him nonetheless...
...years later, Bettelheim loftily informed Pollak that his father had been an ineffective "schlemiel," that his Medea-like mother was wholly to blame for Stephen's emotional ills and, quite falsely, that the brother had committed suicide. No wonder Pollak left that encounter mentally comparing Bettelheim to "the evil Doctor Sivana, arch-nemesis of Captain Marvel...
When Gomes moves on to such universal issues as suffering, joy and science, some topics are slighted: the section on evil seems loath to admit the traditional concept of Satan, even in order to challenge it. More typical, however, is a cheerily trenchant meditation on wealth ("not a sin, but it is a problem.") Fundamentalists will have little use for this book, but its target audience just may be charmed back into the pews...