Word: massing
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...seen on the stage around Britain as Estragon in Waiting for Godot, and on television in the U.S. and Britain opposite Jim Caviezel as the villainous No. 2 in a remake (partly shot in South Africa) of the 1960s British cult series, The Prisoner. He combines high art and mass appeal once more next year when filming begins on The Hobbit, a fourth movie adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's books, in which he will again appear as the great wizard Gandalf. McKellen claims no great strategy for combining critical and commercial success. "How am I expected to make sense...
...force and clarity with which Littell renders the physical realities of war and mass murder are simply astounding. His battlefields are the chaotic, deconstructed battlefields of Tolstoy and Stendhal. As for the genocide ... I have searched in vain for a passage I feel comfortable quoting. Suffice it to say that his descriptions of the most extreme forms of human suffering are explicit and precise. This book is not for the squeamish, and if you're not squeamish, it will make you squeamish...
...Kindly Ones is unmistakably the work of a profoundly gifted writer, if not an especially disciplined one. Littell's great insight is into the damage that genocide does to those who perpetrate it. The Nazi bureaucracy has sold Max and his colleagues on mass murder as a hygienic solution to Germany's woes, regrettable but necessary. But carrying it out tears them to pieces. They stumble around half mad and constantly drunk. They wall off the horror, but it oozes through the cracks. The work of destruction is feeding back into them, destroying them in turn. "What if murder weren...
Unlike many of my colleagues in the mass media, I am suffering from outrage-deficit disorder. It's not that I'm not angry. I am, in fact, frustrated that we've civilized ourselves out of really satisfying scapegoat rituals: The ancients would have staged a mass immolation of the AIG casino pigs in their private jets or crucified Bernie Madoff on the 18th hole at the Palm Beach Country Club, preceded by a public show trial with Jon Stewart as chief magistrate. You probably need an over-the-top catharsis or two like that to get the popular rage...
...that my two worst sins are anger and impatience. Anger is a double-edged sword--sometimes it is entirely justified (as when directed against the shameless torture-enabler Dick Cheney, who persists in fouling our public airwaves). Impatience, though, is a subtler problem, and it is chronic in the mass media. Indeed, it comes with the territory. There are columns to fill, commentaries to spew even when a new Administration has just begun its work and it is way too early to make definitive judgments about its policies. The worst judgments I've made as a journalist were the result...