Word: paranoias
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...only pity those who say turning on the lights at Wrigley is only a hop, skip and a jump away from turning every stadium in the country into a domed monstrosity. Paranoia is an unattractive trait. If it rained as often as it gets dark outside, like every single day, than maybe we'd need domed stadiums. But it doesn...
Given these preoccupations, it was probably inevitable ("There's a pattern in things") that DeLillo would get around to the assassination, that nexus of | paranoia. But it is difficult to see exactly what Libra adds to this event, aside from some temporary diversion. Its argument, that the plot to kill the President was even wider and more sinister than previously imagined, will seem credible chiefly to the already converted, among whom are surely people who also believe that Martians are sending them messages through the fillings in their teeth. There is a simpler possibility that Libra inventively skirts: a frustrated...
What these acolytes are really seeking is moral purity, says Glassner. Proper eating and exercise, he writes, have become "moral acts." Such is the paranoia about staying well that, in his view, Americans have reverted to "some of the least appealing beliefs found in so-called primitive societies." Illness, for example, is viewed not as a natural process but the result of immoral action. Explains Glassner: "We suspect the illness was the person's own fault: he or she should have exercised or eaten properly...
...disease wreaks mental and emotional havoc on those in contact with the diseased. At Risk is a novel with a message: with such a sweeping affect, the virus can only be stopped if we work together and not against each other to educate the ignorant and fight the paranoia and irrationality that has infected our society...
Stoppard, whose plays at minimum offer glorious wordplay and the shimmering surface of what seems to be Big Ideas, is at his funniest and saddest in Hapgood. This one is about physics, espionage, thriller novels, superpower paranoia, Star Wars technology, defectors, conflicts between work and homelife, and the possibilities for flimflammery in employing three sets of twins. The author's ardent anti-Communism seems to have evolved into a world- weariness reminiscent of John le Carre, in which the two camps of the cold war are morally equivalent players of a pointless, deadly game...