Word: joker
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Practical Joker. Before they met, the town was jolted when a stranger appeared at the Kane County recorder's office. In one hand was a chunk of ore, in the other a Geiger counter. The rock seemed to be super-rich with uranium. One prospector who saw it said: "It made that there jagger counter go nuts!" The stranger excitedly told the recorder where he had found the rock, in a seldom-visited foothill area west of town, the opposite direction from the February strike. He filed his claim for the usual 20 acres...
Feeney spotted them from a window, pointed, and sent four of his husky male followers out to get the freshman-joker's name. He refused to give it. At this point Campbell came out of his rooms in A entry and ordered everyone away...
...looks like unshaded hell. The harbingers of doom, headed by Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four), have now been joined by Frenchman Jean Malaquais. His world of the future is as grim a nightmare as theirs. But the hero of Malaquais' The Joker is not one to surrender to a nightmare. What makes him different from most of his fictional counterparts is his unbreakable will to live...
...Super-Babitch. The Joker in the original French is Le Gaffeur, a fellow who always does the wrong thing. Pierre Javelin lives in a police state called the City, where the sky is never visible and people live in parallelepipeds, geometrical monstrosities housing up to 5,000 families. Pierre is not aware that he has done anything wrong when, arriving home one night, he cannot turn his key in the lock. A giant "with a Russian mustache" is living in the apartment, and Pierre's wife is gone...
...Winning Joker. Novelist Malaquais' triumphant joker seems to come from a stacked deck when Pierre, le gaffeur, wins against the overwhelming odds of the City. His prescription, a sardonically simple one, is set forth in an epigraph from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre...