Word: hysteria
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Bartok & Hysteria. Simone de Beauvoir did not spring, like Minerva, full armed from the head of Jove. She had a mother, and the bitter title of her book was a nursing nun's obituary of Mme. de Beauvoir, who died of cancer, saying, "I'm too tired to pray: God is kind." It is a painful book to read, not least because the reader is unsure to the end whether natural piety toward the author's mother will prevail against her severe atheist principles. Mother was 77, "of an age to die," when she was attacked...
...father, and she told her sister that it would be "the same for Maman." Yet, on the night that her mother went under the knife, "I went home; I talked to Sartre; we played some Bartok. Suddenly, at eleven, an outburst of tears that almost degenerated into hysteria. Amazement...
...agency's enthusiasm-"the beautiful hysteria of it all," as one aide put it-only honed outsiders' skepticism. Hadn't the nation heard this sort of talk before? Hadn't Herbert Hoover, just a year before the great collapse of 1929, proclaimed: "We shall soon, with the help of God, be within sight of the day when poverty will be banished from the nation"? In Louisville and Manhattan, bumper stickers and lapel buttons proclaimed: I'M FIGHTING POVERTY. I WORK. Louisiana Congressman Otto Passman complained that the ballyhoo was damaging the U.S. image abroad, averring...
...urban centers where it became popular among jazz musicians, homosexuals, and criminals. Then a lurid press campaign against the "weed of madness" roused the public to indignation over murders, rapes, infanticides, and all manner of heinous crimes supposedly committed under its influence. The most significant outcome of the resulting hysteria over the Marihuana Menace was the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, which empowered the Treasure Department and its Bureau of Narcotics to control traffic in Cannabis...
...shadow across 130 years and a thousand writers. It is as if this young, 19th century German with a mind like burning phosphorus and a heart like an open grave had had an apocalyptic dramatic vision of the 20th century, with its human holocausts, scientific arrogance, uncertain values, private hysteria and despair. Out of this vision, he made a sketchbook of hell-a melancholy intuition, perhaps, of the death that was already seeping through his own veins to claim him at 23. The appeal to self-pitying modern men is that Buechner was the first playwright to cast the hero...