Word: hellers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Last week eleven distinguished University of Minnesota professors, including Economist Walter W. Heller, a former top adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, met with the Vice President and told him that some of his public utterances were "driving moderates into the arms of extremists." They said that among their temperate students there is a "widespread distrust of their Government, a mixture of fear and resentment toward America's leadership." They suggested that Agnew criticize violence in all quarters-hardhat right as well as student left-and that he generally tone down his language. Said the Vice President: "Maybe they...
...chronicle of war is the Bible of irony. The original victim of that mistaken-identity crisis was a B-25 bombardier named Joseph Heller during a World War II raid over Avignon. He was a dozen feet from the pilot; yet they were separated by layers of chaos and terror. It was not Heller who was hurt?it was his gunner who was bleeding copiously into his flight suit. It was Heller's 37th mission. From that instant of agony he grew petrified of flight. When his war ended, he took a ship home; it was some 15 years later...
...experience was too extravagant to be fiction and too real to be borne. Heller furnished the 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...
Nearly 5,000,000 readers nevertheless found it one of the most original comic novels of their time. They found it so funny, in fact, that surely half of them ignored Heller's own warnings: that Catch-22 is no more about the Army Air Corps than Kafka's The Trial was about Prague; that "the cold war is what I was truly talking about, not the World War"; and that the second biggest character in the novel is death...
...persistent focus, it all makes the kind of perfect nonsense that finally is the concomitant of wisdom. Like Through the Looking Glass, Catch-22 overturns commonplaces and makes them fresh. Its optimism is despairing; its doubt is born of faith. "When Yossarian runs away in the end," says Heller, "I never said that he would get all the way. I wrote: 'The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.' But he tries, he changes. That's the best that can be said for any of us." It is the best that can be said of Nichols...