Word: manias
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...mother, Danny is treated to more grim realism and the reader to Author Farrell's small-fry prose: "Danny didn't like it, seeing his new baby brother being fed at Mama's breasts . . . When he was a little baby he did that, got milk from Mania's breast. It almost made him mad. Why did God make it that way? It was like oysters. Oysters looked like milk that would make you maybe sick if you ate them. He couldn't look at oysters...
There are reasons for this mania to escape from an institution which is the pride and joy of other U.S. cities and towns. While school-age hoodlums are the small minority of students in New York, their precocious propensity for vandalism, gang "rumbles." narcotics, sex orgies and extortion make them an eternal menace in many a school. Even in quieter districts, the public-school child is still gulped up by the world's most enormous* -and in many ways its most faceless and impersonal-educational system. He becomes simply one by this autumn's figures...
...While I lived in the United States I was a science-fiction addict myself," confessed Hungarian Author Arthur (Darkness at Noon) Koestler in Harper's Bazaar, "and I am still liable to occasional relapses." But the American mania for "reading about space travel, time travel, martian maidens and extragalactic supermen is habit-forming, like opium, murder thrillers and yoghurt diets ... [A kind of] apocalyptic intuition [that] the human race may be a biological misfit doomed to extinction . . . may be one of the reasons for the sudden interest in life on other stars...
...start at the age of six, he decides in retrospect, when his own father ditched Tom's mother for a mistress. By his 20s, Tom is a self-assured young bachelor-businessman whose only known vice is fondling his secretary. Outside office hours, however, he has a mania for playing the horses, and it is not long before Tom taps the company till. He skips town one jump ahead...
...death of Kathy, his mania has betrayed...