Word: zeal
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Becker, founder and head of his own little company in Metairie, La., Behavioral Engineering Center, may be a little premature in his Orwellian zeal. But the idea of subliminal communication has long intrigued behavioral scientists. In the mid-1950s a marketing researcher named James Vicary broke ground of sorts by inserting rapidly flashing words between the frames of a film to stimulate refreshment sales ("Hungry? Eat popcorn") in a Fort Lee, N.J., moviehouse. Pictures of a skull and the word blood were also added to two horror movies. But this practice soon fell out of favor after it was exposed...
...complicate the unbelievable, she and Starbuck had been Communists in their youth. His zeal has withered with age, but not hers. "After I die," she tells Starbuck, "you look in my left shoe . . . You will find my will in there. I leave the RAMJAC Corporation to its rightful owners, the American people." Starbuck is dazzled by the purity of her motive but convinced that her act will make not one whit of difference to the way people live: "The economy is a thoughtless weather system - and nothing more. Some joke on the people, to give them such a thing...
ENTER TO HOWL. That night, he approached me with all the zeal and impulse of a new American spirit. Little Joe was naked and bold, still dressed in the irreverent street rags of adolescence; he shed Harvard's illusions of grandeur and specialty with every step. The world of people and events wafted about his presence far-removed and unimportant. HE was the moment, ignorant and unconcerned with the vague promises of the future of the past...
...drugs. There was his high school girlfriend, pretty and clinging after his every step; there was the guitar which he was struggling to play, and the home-made stereo which demolished thousands of records. He was an incongruous blend of toughness, wit, frustration, recklessness, friendliness and zeal. Lots of zeal, all of it poorly channelled. He wanted to be a rock and roll star, you see, but in the end he wound up being himself. Lovable, but dangerous...
Unlike C.S. Lewis, Sayers did not come late to religion. It was "no accident," she later wrote, that Gaudy Night, her penultimate detective work, and The Zeal of Thy House, her first religious drama, were "variations upon a hymn to the Master Maker." During her later years, religion became increasingly important in her life. Hone follows Sayers as, dressed in mannish suits, she made her public rounds of BBC talks and academic lectures. But her private life remains largely a mystery-as does Hone's reason for calling this a "literary biography," since it fails to analyze the books...