Word: madmen
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...this Islamophobic age, the sort of brilliant, embattled writer and public intellectual who has almost ceased to exist. Prolific and serene, Naguib-bey stood his ground, which was Egypt. He did not leave, even to collect his Nobel Prize. He wrote about growing up in Cairo, about movie stars, madmen, beggars, pashas, gods and religion. His bravest book is Children of the Alley, with its parable of Islam--banned in most Arab countries. Condemned to death in a fatwa issued by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, he continued defiantly walking the streets of Cairo until...
...vigorously ripping itself to shreds following the death of King Robert Baratheon. Martin shoots the action from many angles, with a dozen narrators, the better to reflect its gritty, twisty, many-sided nature and its vast cast of would-be queens and kings, rogues, bastards, bandits, madmen, mercenaries, exiles, priests and various uncategorizable wild cards. Martin may write fantasy, but his politik is all real...
...probably serves everyone right that this one is the pits. Stanley White (Mickey Rourke, an impish altar-boy type with what looks like chalk dust in his hair to make him look middle-aged) is another of Cimino's righteous madmen, a police captain brought in to clean up New York City's Chinatown. It is an uphill battle, against inscrutable thugs, a silky tong lord (John Lone), a TV reporter (the incompetent actress Ariane) and preposterous dialogue by Cimino and Oliver Stone. Soporific when it is not offensive, Year of the Dragon may some day engender a confessional memoir...
...rivers--why not? For his hyperkinetic, endearing, exasperating 1957 novel, Kerouac tried to admit whole worlds. An account of a few pinwheeling characters in perpetual cross-country motion, it had room to spare for rivers, landscapes, starry skies, Benzedrine addicts, endless marathons of driving and lots of fast-talking madmen. "Because the only people for me are the mad ones," Kerouac's narrator, Sal Paradise, tells us. "The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved...
...novelist, and a very fine one, Patrick McGrath has specialized in the modern Gothic, books in which madmen of one kind or another work their wiles. But his superb and unwholesome new novel, Port Mungo (Knopf; 242 pages), is not about anything so simple as abnormal psychology. It's about the brutal impulses available to anyone, especially artists, who would let slip the loose restraints of civilization...