Word: hellers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
CATCH-22 (443 pp.)-Joseph Heller-Simon & Schusfer...
...setting is the tiny island of Pianosa, just south of Elba, in the final months of World War II. Here the Army Air Forces maintains a bomber squadron, but it is a squadron that never was or could have been on land, sea or air. For Author Heller has peopled his first novel with madmen-not routine flyboy madmen, but men whose every act is exuberantly, viciously, tragically irrational...
Horror & Hilarity. This kind of magnificent illogic whips like a mistral all through the novel, blowing both sequence and motivation into a rubble of farcical shocks and grisly surprises. Catch-22 is held together only by the inescapable fact that Joseph Heller is a superb describer of people and things. Take his portrait of a character called Hungry Joe: "A jumpy, emaciated wretch with a fleshless face of dingy skin and bone and twitching veins squirming subcutaneously in the blackened hollows behind his eyes like severed sections of snake. Hungry Joe ate voraciously, gnawed incessantly at the tips...
...Heller's Yossarian might have been the creature of a benign Kafka-engagingly bedeviled, drolly pathetic. By feigning madness in ways that only a madman could invent (standing naked in formation to receive a Distinguished Flying Cross, marching backward in parades), Yossarian proclaims his withdrawal from the whole business of the war itself...
...this encouraged the growing belief among economic policymakers-from "conservative" Federal Reserve Board Chairman William McChesney Martin Jr. to "liberal" Chief Presidential Economist Walter Heller-that the nation can have prosperity as well as stable prices. If so, that would contradict the inflationary pattern of previous postwar recoveries (see chart). But, as Treasury Under Secretary Robert Roosa says, "this recovery period is different from all others...