Word: manias
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...gold mania spread north to Walla Walla, Wash. A butcher found six nuggets in two chickens' crops. . . . It spread south to Arizona. Miners at Dripping Springs started a rush by declaring they had found lode worth $100,000 per ton. (Oldtimers scented a stock-selling game.) It spread west to California...
Mirror. The Hearst Mirror covered its front page with close-up portraits of the Brownings and, in prodigious type: "SUNNY CRAZY." (Mr. Browning's portrait stood for the "B" in "Bunny"). Shaking letters were used to print: "FLAMING YOUTH." Subtitle: "His Mania Causes Peculiar Love for Young Girls-Alienist." Text: "A famous [anonymous] alienist . . . diagnoses his case as 'pathological pedophilia,' a symptom of a disease of the brain classified as a sexual aberration. . . ." The Mirror, too, strove for features to please child minds-an "interview" (in mixed dialects) with Mr, Browning's pet African goose...
...these things. In his matter-of-fact fashion, so quiet that it becomes mysterious, he makes her father a sort of pocket-borough St. Francis of Assisi. He fills her heart with restlessness and her head with innocent resolution, keeps her procrastinating over escape until her father's mania for feeding birds is quite pronounced, until she has a friend and perhaps lover in the grocer's son, until one more village Easter passes and the first nightingale has sung. Then go she does, Anne Dunnock of Dry Coulter, to equivocal Paris where the grocer...
Next day, still fogged with raw fumes, he made his way back to Buermeyer's rooms. The man lay where he had left him, inert. The sight precipitated fresh mania and Mr. Carson attacked once more, exhorting his opponent to "stand up and take it." Buermeyer was unconscious. He felt nothing during ensuing minutes when his assailant kicked, beat, bashed him with a milk bottle, shoved him around the floor with a broomstick, tried to smother him with a dressing gown. He lay so limp, with blood streaming from ear, nose, jaw, forehead and the base of his skull...
...suffering and anticipation which permeate the facts of his life, and the lives of his followers, were in some measure caught by Sudermann. The Repertory version catches even less of that spirit. Melo-drama vies with the ridiculous, approaching farce, where only dignity and religious feeling were intended. The mania for making the unreal appear real, for putting Hamlet in plus fours, can amuse but hardly impress. Perhaps there were wise-cracking merchants in Israel but we can't believe they had Irish-Mayfair-Swedish brogues...