Word: insomniac
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Died. Samuel Dashiell Hammett, 66, seclusive insomniac whose tours-de-corpse (Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon) revolutionized detective fiction by taking murder out of the hands of English butlers and giving it back to the people who usually commit it; of chronic lung disease; in New York City. A onetime Pinkerton agent who hung on to his job only because of the literary quality of his reports, Hammett contracted TB while an ambulance driver during World War I and, while convalescing, perfected a bone-clean prose style perfectly suited to a brutal world of crime in which private cops were...
...often savage wit, the book reduces major philosophical questions to potted, page-long parables. Seryozha, for instance, loses his faith in God (Stalin) because, when he goes out with his school comrades to harvest potatoes, he discovers that the "electric plows" of Soviet propaganda do not exist. The insomniac Karlinsky wonders why death has not yet been abolished. And to match his vision of "The Future," one would have to go back to the indignatio saeva of Swift himself...
...night leap into popular psychiatry this week was Joyce Brothers, 31, the blonde psychologist (Ph.D. Columbia, 1953) and book-taught boxing expert who three years ago took the $64,000 Question and the $64,000 Challenge for $134,000. Possibly assuming that Jack Paar sets up an audience of insomniac worriers, NBC has tacked Consult Dr. Brothers onto the end of the broadcast day (11:15 a.m.. weekdays). Dr. Joyce, who warmed up with a daytime show for a year, is the network's new way of bidding the country good night. Says she: "Our purpose...
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, by Simone de Beauvoir. An all-but-Proustian remembrance of things past, when the future queen of existentialism was a proper, fretful and insomniac student princess...
...cold dark before winter dawn, by the TV screen's eerie blue glare, the show's rumpled star looks like an insomniac alchemist. With spectacles sliding down his nose, he brews electrons, protons and mesons while evoking Newton, Faraday, Planck, Einstein and Heisenberg. To watch NBC's Continental Classroom (6:307 a.m.), some 275,000 Americans are sacrificing sleep for science five days a week...