Word: sickness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...well. He picks great subjects. You keep having to remind yourself that Serpentine is, after all, non-fiction. In fact, after reading a couple of Thompson's quasi-novels, one might accuse him of choosing topics that any garden-variety journalist could fish a bestseller out of. Grisly, morbid, sick, perverse, psychotic--all this, and true...
MOSCOW--Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev is sick, possibly due to fatigue from a hunting trip in East Germany, sources said yesterday...
Denying rumors of Brezhnev's death, several Soviet sources said the president is sick, but they did not identify his illness or its severity. One East European source said his malady is "hardly enough to justify the kind of stories that are going around...
Wolff insists that despite its vile moments, "it had been fun to be my father's son." The joy is not apparent in his depictions of Duke's sick maneuvers. Case in point: an adolescent Geoffrey dubs a well-endowed schoolgirl "pear-shaped." When Duke finds out, he locks his son alone with him in the bedroom, strips him and beats him senseless with his razor strop (a prized possession incidentally, one of Duke's "glittering things"). When the punishment is sufficiently administered, his father Duke picks up his lifeless son, hugs him and whispers, "Be good. Try at least...
...indeed, is the point of all this? Why does Abe depict people as freaks and reduce their motivations to a series of mechanical and sexual impulses? If, as the author once said, this novel is "a parable of city life," then it appears that we are a society of sick helping the sick. Abe, who holds a medical degree but has never practiced, breaks all human relations down into physician-patient relationships where, as "the horse" acknowledges, "Doctors are cruel, and patients endure their cruelty...that's the law of survival." It is not an appealing view of human nature...