Word: hysteria
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...precisely to fill this vacuum that man devised the concept of God in the first place. But try to cajole a group of disillusioned children into believing in Santa Claus again; it won't work, and I suggest we search elsewhere to cure the mass hysteria already enveloping the world as man slowly awakens from a cherished fairy tale...
Baseball is obviously the best dominant metaphor for a book of this kind. It's got everything: pioneer individualism and a territorial imperative much more basic than football's corporate effort; a hockey, circus atmosphere peculiar to the American brand of mass hysteria; a dying smell about it; a system for making heroes in the center spotlight; an evangelical twist. It's got politics and it's got religion...
...HYSTERIA ABOUT shield laws for newspaper reporters has subsided since the national media saturated American readers in January and February with argument and counter-argument on its First Amendment sanctity...
These stories represent an almost too successful literary strategy of simulated monotony. Like the films of his fellow countryman Antonioni, Moravia's near fantasies are surreal studies of boredom at point of hysteria. There is little sense of time or place. Moravia's women seldom have names. They seem to inhabit a kind of limbo, a never land of listlessness. Often they are rich, like the antiheroine of I Haven't Time, who is the seventh-best-dressed woman in the world. But their money buys them nothing they want because they really have no wants they...
...tends toward melodrama or sing-song declamation. Tyler is adequate in a role comparable to the straight man in a comedy team; like a kindly next-door neighbor, she foils the cries and anguish of Prometheus and Io. The madness of Claps's Io just touches the edge of hysteria...