Word: monomaniacally
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...Moby Dick is the voyage of a soul as well as a ship, and that journey goes willfully off course. What is missing is the tragic sense. Captain Ahab is an authentic tragic hero; Welles makes him merely a monomaniac of vengeance. In book and play, Ahab speaks of the "malice inscrutable" of the White Whale. His mate Starbuck, the voice of reason, reminds him that "a poor dumb thing" can have no malice. What Welles fails to grasp is that it is the inscrutability that maddens Ahab, for Moby Dick is the universal mystery of things as they...
...judgment on Wilson (Harry Townes): "God gave us his Ten Commandments; we broke them. Wilson gave us his Fourteen Points; we shall see." On the whole, the note of authenticity was worth the price of occasional stiltedness, particularly in the juxtaposition of a courageous Lincoln (Michael Tolan) with a monomaniac McClellan, a tough T. R. (boisterously acted by Larry Blyden) with a reactionary J. P. Morgan, who remarked magnificently, on hearing that Roosevelt had gone on a safari: "I hope the first lion who sees him does his duty...
...Horse's Mouth. The wine of genius mixed with just plain sewage in an uneven but arresting version of Joyce Gary's memorable novel about a lovable monomaniac painter, with Alec Guinness as star and adapter...
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. About a middle-aged monomaniac's obsession with an adolescent "nymphet." Brilliantly writ ten, by turns hilarious and horrifying, it is a strange but major work of fiction...
Lolita is a major work of fiction; it is also a shocking book. Prefaced by a fictitious academic fathead who presents it as a message to "parents, social workers, [and] educators," the book describes the transcontinental debauch of a twelve-year-old girl by a middle-aged monomaniac. As it turns out, the narrator is writing his apologia from a prison cell (he is to be tried for murder). As far as erotic detail is concerned, the book tells little that has not been dealt with in a lot of bestselling fiction; but where the sexy bestsellers talk about...