Word: maniacally
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Whites, who appear to be leftovers from McMurtry's Pulitzer-prizewinning novel, Lonesome Dove, are no less crude. The local Beck clan is ruled by an ancient maniac named White Sut, who keeps a sow bear on a chain and beats the animal daily with a fence post. One day the bear breaks the chain, pulls off White Sut's head, and leaves it in the middle of the main road. This is widely regarded as a good joke. So is a courtroom altercation (12 dead, including the judge) in which Zeke tries earnestly to kill another lowbrow Beck...
...elite team of government agents is assigned to infiltrate a fortress commandeered by a charismatic maniac. Then comes a fatal ambush of the good guys, and all that remains of our super team is star quality. Can't you see the lighting of the fuse, hear the hopscotch rhythms of a Lalo Schifrin theme? All right, the threat--like most threats in recent spy movies--is domestic, not international. But The Rock, this week's entry in the summer-movie testostero-thon, still looks like an instant sequel to Mission: Impossible...
...political and at their most florid are, though much admired, in fact not clear in any direction. Winter's Tale, for instance, is an obscure and very long fantasy about an annoying magical horse. His most recent, Memoir from Antproof Case, is marvelous, brilliantly written bosh about an elderly maniac who fulminates obsessively against coffee. Coffee? Sure...
WHILE MORROW AND OTHERS ENGAGE IN analysis and sophistry trying to explain what happened at Dunblane, the most fundamental reason is clear: the monster Hamilton had four loaded handguns. Would the gun worshippers have us believe that this maniac could have achieved such a level of carnage with a sword or a bow and arrow? CHARLES ESTES Fullerton, California...
...evil exists, then what happened in the gymnasium at Primary 1 was evil. An eruption of such violence aimed at such targets, at such spotless innocence and hope, cannot be comprehended or diagnosed in language that is less than absolute. "Haywire" won't do. "Psychotic," "maniac" and so on suggest mere dysfunction, or else a morally neutral spasm of the reptilian brain, a bug or two in the limbic system. Nor is there much comfort in thinking that such behavior arises from some Darwinian maladaption. "Man has developed so rapidly," Loren Eiseley wrote, "that he has suffered a major loss...