Word: monstrously
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Adolf Hitler has long been established as the 20th century's Great Satan, the base line of evil; Joseph Stalin, equally monstrous by most objective measures, comes in a distant second--maybe even third behind Pol Pot. One big difference was World War II: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and so Stalin's enormities were courteously minimized in the wartime alliance against Hitler, when the Russian leader became pipe-smoking "Uncle Joe." After that, the demonology never entirely caught up with...
...real world," writes Hiss, "there is no way to squeeze together in one person the translucent father I got to know and the monstrous Alger that Chambers talked and wrote about." Hiss makes his case by quoting at length the lovely letters Alger wrote to him and Priscilla from the Lewisburg federal penitentiary, where he served three years and eight months in the early '50s. In effect, says Tony, the letters--gentle, loving, teasing, serene, filled with the observations of a bird watcher and stargazer--exonerate Alger. Bad things happen to good people. Alger's creed was not Marxism...
...Lost Man's River), which are told as conflicting reports by townspeople. Thus the concluding novel, Bone by Bone (Random House; 410 pages; $26.95), which is Watson's own first-person account, appears after 900 pages of teasing preamble. Because the author has advertised his main character as a monstrous enigma, he must now provide the monster. But Watson's villainy doesn't reach heroic stature. He is a likable bully and a good shot. Most notably, he is a brutal drunk. "When I give in to that urge to drink and stir up trouble," he admits, "there comes...
This home truth explains a great deal that seems merely shabby, not monstrous, and not puzzling enough to require three wagonloads of explication. The author may have been right, incidentally, not to present this rough man's thoughts in rough dialect. For long paragraphs, however, the words that come out of Watson's mouth are, somewhat jarringly, the worthy, scholarly, perceptive, always interesting, late 20th century observations of Peter Matthiessen. About his quirky trilogy a reader might conclude: brilliant, obsessive, panoramic--and two novels too many...
...know that the smug Senator Palpatine will eventually reveal his dastardliness as he transforms into the creepy Emporer we've seen in Return of the Jedi. And we know that somehow, he will act in turning the thoughtful and loving little Anakin to the Dark Side to become the monstrous Darth Vader...