Word: hell
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...embarrassing," admits Yippie Abbie Hoffman. "You try to overthrow the Government and end up on the bestseller list." Helped by the substantial sum of $75,000 that his Revolution for the Hell of It and Woodstock Nation have netted him in royalties and film rights, Hoffman has been able to overcome his embarrassment enough to start two more books. When Publisher Bennett Cerf of Random House took a lady visitor to meet his son, Editor Christopher Cerf, he sauntered unannounced into Christopher's office to find Hoffman slouched shirtless at the desk, scribbling away. "That...
...corpse with a vaudeville wardrobe, mixed in '50s America, and called his novel Catch-22. Black, mad and surreal, it told of a bombardier named Yossarian impaled on the insanity of war and struggling to escape. Undergraduates still see Yossarian as a lionly coward, the first of the hell-no-we-won't-go rebels who had to go anyway. To them, the book's final sentence limns the human condition as well as the hero's: "The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took...
...hall hustler to full-time racketeer. In a crude and overdrawn caricature, the loutish blond fly-boy suddenly becomes a Hitlerian symbol who bombs American bases in a deal with the Germans and sells stocks in the war because it is good business. Here Nichols?like Heller?cannot let hell enough alone, and Engine Charlie's oft-quoted G.M. dictum is paraphrased "What's good enough for M-M Enterprises is good...
Where stands Don Juan in the sexual revolution? Like Faust, he is one of the archetypes of Western culture -snapping his fingers at human decency and God's law, acting out man's secret fantasy of seduction as a way of life. Punishment was necessary, of course; hell ultimately yawns for him in many of the legend's countless versions, with a macabre assist from a stone statue stamping after him for vengeance. A sense of wickedness, though, depends on an accepted set of rules and values. In the permissive, post-Christian world, the idea of seduction...
...amphetamines. Except for a spectacular denouement (Papa dropping Librium, son suffering amphetamine withdrawal, both jabbering Oedipal home truths as they cross Washington Square, drunk on drugs and adrenalin), the book is totally convincing. One emerges unnerved from Travers' nightmare. Seen through a screen of mind-blown local color, hell really seems to be located somewhere east of Second Avenue...