Word: heroines
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ever been in the U.S. before, they were subject to federal law because each was said to be part of a smuggling conspiracy that extended into the U.S. In most of the cases, there was little question that the men involved had dealt in cocaine and sometimes heroin. The question was whether they had been abducted, in effect, with the connivance of U.S. authorities...
...stark evil in this plan quickly flowers into nightmare. Two hoodlums pick up Hicks' trail the moment he arrives in Berkeley. He and Marge escape with the heroin, but when Converse gets home he walks into a trap. The thugs are not, as it happens, emissaries from the underworld but something worse: agents for a corrupt federal officer, bent on picking off the heroin for himself before staging a phony drug bust on Converse and his accomplices. The chase that follows is unforgettable...
...world capable of producing the horrors of war, "people are just naturally going to want to get high." Hicks concentrates on the exploit's challenge and itches to hurl his own aggressiveness into the void he imagines around him. Marge, already hooked on pills, accepts the heroin's arrival as fated...
Such equivocations blind them to the truth of their situation, which is also the novel's truth. The heroin is as shackling a possession as the bag of gold in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale. Indeed, it is worse. Chaucer's three thieves at least thought that the gold was benign. Their catastrophe stemmed from disregarding Christian doctrine: radix malorum est cupiditas (greed is the root of all evil). Without a moral compass, Stone's characters cannot even plead ignorance. The irony that the heroin's value is rooted in its destructiveness does...
Competing Manias. This elemental tale is played out against a backdrop of the here and now. Heroin brings the Viet Nam War home to a sunny California filled with burnt-out cases from the '60s: deracinated hippies, faded gurus, old people driven mad by the gap between promise and truth. This Western strip of civilization has become a collection of competing manias, and its traces-rooming houses, motels, highways-are perched on the edge of primitive wilderness. Driving out of Los Angeles, Hicks comments on the quick change of scenery: "Go out for a Sunday spin...