Word: excessive
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...film, Cardigan doesn't come off. Along with his establishment colleagues in government and the army, Howard's Cardigan is a walking caricature, not a man. He blusters and fumbles, he forgets the simplest things, and he carries unreasoning insistence on detail and perfection to an impossible excess. Of course, the film is being billed as a kind of epic-satire, and this kind of excess is the staple of satire. But to satirize history is absurd. A historical film can only try to depict and explain; satire is meant to correct, and history cannot be corrected. For this reason...
...Mexico, it soon becomes apparent, nothing succeeds like excess. Color not only decorates, but explodes, whether in specially planted flowerbeds or in the elaborate symbol and color-coding system that the Mexicans have devised to guide tourists to the games. All that a person going to the basketball games in the Sports Palace has to do is hail a cab bearing the basketball symbol or follow the green lampposts. To Mexico City's normal generous supply of 20,000 taxis, 3,400 special volunteer cars have been added, all color-coded to designate their destination...
Loving and Flying. As with many another famous Victorian, her trouble-as well as her eventual triumph-lay in a longing for love and an excess of earnestness. Born plain Mary Anne Evans, the bright but ungainly daughter of a non-U Derbyshire estate agent, she lost her faith at 22 (in 1842) after a characteristically exhaustive study of new scientific attacks on the Scriptures. (She had attended several schools, but was largely self-educated.) When she declined to accompany her father to church, he refused to have her under the same roof and sent her away...
Although he never mentioned Chicago directly, Clark gave a considerably cooler perspective. "Experience to date shows that such crowds [of demonstrators] can be controlled without denying rights of speech and assembly," he said. "Above all, such crowds can be controlled without excessive force and violence by police. Of all violence, police violence in excess of authority is the most dangerous. For who will protect the public when the police violate...
...critic-novelist (After the War, Miss America) long preoccupied with the dusty corners of the modern soul, proves a deft performer. His literary colleague Kurt Vonnegut recently toyed with industrialized suicide (Welcome to the Monkey House), but only as an example of the dehumanized modern world efficiently eliminating Malthusian excess. Stern's Suicide Academy, by contrast, has a more promising metaphoric reach...