Word: mania
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MILE HIGH, by Richard Condon. The author's mania for mania is still evident. But this flawed novel about a man who invented, and then profited from Prohibition eventually settles into unpalatable allegory...
...worst of times: the first half of the 17th century. Spain rotted. The German principalities writhed. Sweden, France, Spain and even Switzerland were seething with religious mania. The European peasantry was regularly picked over by tax collectors and aimless bands of soldiers detached from all allegiance. Trade patterns kept collapsing. The gaudy corpse of feudalism weighted the Continent, but there was nothing, apparently, strong enough to winch it out of sight...
MILE HIGH, by Richard Condon. The author's mania for mania is still evident. But this flawed novel about a man who invented, and then profited from, Prohibition eventually settles into unpalatable allegory...
Condon's great and nourishing strength has always been his mania for mania. The mushy midsection of the human-behavior range has no interest for him, and ordinary psychosis not much more. What grips his imagination, and shakes it till splendid words fall out, is the tic of a human bomb. In one novel, a beautiful woman feeds for 20 years on the high-held hope that she will one day, somehow, be able to chop up her lover with a machete. In another, a man sets out, in more sinister fashion, to learn by heart every last scrap...
...Circle. Peter Kropotkin was a prince of Imperial Russia and, as the Irish say, a prince of men. He could have been a pampered and powerful member of the Establishment he chose to fight against; he cheerfully endured exile and long imprisonment but showed none of the pride, power mania or personal deviousness that disfigure the image of so many revolutionaries. As a child, he had slept during a court ball in the future Czarina's semi-sacred lap, and he died (at 78) safe, as it were, in the bosom of Stalin, only a troika's drive...