Word: heroicize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
FREUD: A LIFE FOR OUR TIME by Peter Gay (Norton: $25). The founder of psychoanalysis is revealed as an ambitious outsider driven by a heroic (and perhaps neurotic?) greed for knowledge and a desire to conquer and control...
...element of his impatience, frightening to the city that has already lost the basketball Bullets and football Colts, is that Williams is seven surgeries into a heroic fight against cancer. "If I die," he has said, "the team will be sold." Though the city is offering Williams a new stadium, he seems to be resisting signing any lease. A grim knowledge of trustees and their responsibility to highest bidders makes Baltimore wonder if this melancholy team is the final edition...
...European intellectual full of skeptical opinions about the cultural imperialism of American movies. His film may have been snubbed by several Hollywood studios and mishandled by the company that finally distributed it. But hand him a gold-plated statuette in front of a billion people, and he finds heroic resources of good feeling. Just ask Bernardo Bertolucci. "It's incredible," the Italian filmmaker, 47, geysered the day after his The Last Emperor swept the Oscar ceremony. "First it was one award, then two, three, four, five, six-seven-eight-nine! It went beyond the individuals who won. I realized...
...Hollywood standards, The Last Emperor is a supremely daring film. Instead of following the normal emotional trajectory of movie epics -- struggle, triumph, despair, reconciliation -- Bertolucci's film runs a slalom course of disillusionment. In worldly or heroic terms, Pu Yi attains nothing. He loses his power, then his title, then his freedom. Nor is Pu Yi personally attractive; he can be both toady and bully. "He's not a sympathetic character," says Screenwriter Mark Peploe, who is Bertolucci's brother-in- law. "I resisted even trying to understand him when I wrote the script." But any alert viewer can understand...
Bechstein's adventure is like that of T.S. Eliot's in "Four Quartets." At the end of his destination, Bechstein arrives at the same place he had been, only to find it different than he had remembered it. In retrospect, he appreciates the journey, which grows to heroic proportions in his memory...