Word: humanation
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Carried away by a kind of folie à deux, the boys resolve "to explore all the possibilities of human experience," to pluck the most exotic flowers of evil. Murder, Artie decides, is the only thing that will satisfy his compulsion "to do something really dangerous," and Judd loyally approves "the perfect crime" as "the true test of the superior intellect." So they kidnap a 14-year-old schoolboy named Paulie Kessler (fictional name for Bobby Franks), cosh-kill him in the back of a rented car, and dump the body in a culvert. Remorse? Artie seems incapable of human feeling...
Soon, of course, the perfect crime collapses into a heap of all-too-human, even childish errors-Judd was so rattled that he dropped his spectacles beside the body of the victim. The boys are questioned, tricked into confession, ordered to trial...
...purpose: to blast General Electric Co., whose decentralization program (TIME, Jan. 12) has created heavy, if temporary, unemployment in cities where plants were shut down. The film shows troubles in Fort Wayne, Ind., Lynn, Mass. and Bloomfield, N.J. A Presbyterian minister argues: "The profit motive has destroyed the human personality." I.U.E. President James Barron Carey himself pleads for sympathy from G.E. and its shareholders...
Blowing incessantly, desiccating the town and the vineyards, pausing only to howl at a higher pitch, is a "furious monotonous purposeless wind"-hence the book's title. It is the breath of a malevolent universe and carries the inevitability of human defeat...
...writers had cause for complaint: stupidity, their own or that of others, landed them in jail.* In this head-shaking book, Author Paul Tabori notes that man's incurable doltishness has managed to fill the prisons and crowd the executioner's block with the finest intelligences the human race could produce. A partial list: Plato, Socrates, Seneca, Boethius, Cervantes, Sir Walter Raleigh, Daniel Defoe, Voltaire, Beaumarchais, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Verlaine...