Word: nietzscheanisms
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...been about professions as well as people. Significantly, they are professions that are deeply revered and mistrusted for their power over life. Last year's Wonderland was about doctors-an old medical megalomaniac and his foster son. The new novel, her sixth, concerns lawyers. Marvin Howe is a Nietzschean criminal lawyer-vainglorious, corrupt, wondrously successful, obsessed with his control over people. His opposite number is less obviously a monster. Jack Morrissey defends social outcasts and agitators, the teeming poor of Detroit. He lives simply, but is just as bewitched by power as Howe...
...thoughts of Jack London as an allegory of the potential tragedy hidden in the dream. As a writer, London rises out of the working class to national fame and wealth. As he becomes rich and famous London indulges a variety of self-destructive dreams; he thinks himself a Nietzschean superman; he builds himself a great mansion which burns to the ground; he kids himself that his habitual drinking is not alcoholism; he refuses to believe that his aging body is no longer strong and healthy. Finally, alone and despairing, he kills himself. In London's suicide Starr perceives the possible...
Died. Nathan Leopold, 66, who with Richard Loeb murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks for the thrill of it in 1924; of a heart attack; in San Juan. Both brilliant graduate students and the offspring of wealthy Chicago businessmen, Leopold and Loeb fancied themselves Nietzschean "supermen"-a notion that they set out to prove by carefully planning the kidnap-execution of a random victim. The killers were spared the death penalty and sentenced to life imprisonment "plus 99 years" after Defense Attorney Clarence Darrow made pioneering use of psychiatric testimony. Loeb was slashed to death in a 1936 prison fight...
Together they may eventually shape Homo futurus, a creature resembling the Superman of the Nietzschean and Shavian dream?or at least one whose powers will be dramatically different from contemporary...
Obviously there is a Nietzschean streak in Cioran. A chapter called "Skeptic & Barbarian" dubs the skeptic -himself, of course-"that living dead man." With bitter sentimentality he half praises the barbarian, the man in touch with his instincts and out of touch with cursed self-awareness. "He who has never envied the vegetable," he writes, "has missed the human drama...