Word: half-mad
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Illegal Short Cut. The indignities mount. Mukasa's long-sought aunt, the twin sister of his dead mother, proves to be a filthy, half-mad old woman who has been driven from the tribe as a witch. To save her wretched life, McNair risks taking an illegal short cut through the Belgian Congo. They are swiftly arrested. McNair, as a white man, is quartered with the Belgian officers, but Mukasa gets slapped around by the hard-eyed police and thrown into a jail crammed with demented African cultists. Engineering an escape, McNair brings them all to a greater doom...
...both its moral and its theatrical merits. Few men tried at Duerrenmatt's Court of the Unconscious would escape whipping; in the unconscious of the very men who stage the trials there may lurk as much blood lust as love of law. They, with their icy, refined, half-mad sense of justice, and the American, with his coldhearted dog-eat-dog view of life, face one another with contrasted inhumanity; the space between them seems nothing less at times than all groping humanity itself. But the play has a parlor-game brittleness and bite, and at its best...
...Half-mad with bereavement and fright, Algeria's Europeans were easily persuaded to blame all their troubles on De Gaulle. Relentlessly, right-wing politicians hammered at the argument that De Gaulle's offer of self-determination for Algeria was a display of weakness which encouraged the rebels to believe they could win independence by violence. But without the support of the army, the settlers could not hope to resist De Gaulle successfully. And though increasing numbers of junior officers outspokenly echoed the settlers' complaints, Old Gaullist Massu had long made it clear that, while he might grumble...
...firmly that at last they seem as important and ominous as any character in the book. When the bomb finally goes off, it is not so much an exclamation point as a period to a narrative that has told all but judged nothing. Who is to say that the half-mad sad-sack hero really is different from the nihilist leader, or that the civil servant's allegiance is so far removed from the revolutionary's? Author Biely makes the reader work toward the answers...
This is the simple outline of Novelist-Playwright Felicien Marceau's new book, but it is the portraits within, not the frame without, that make it a sparkling display of French tragicomedy. An irresistible pair are stern father de Gau-grand, a half-mad patrician whose "broad back [extends] like the Great Wall of China," and his wife, who wears newspapers (for warmth) throughout the winter and sits down to all meals in hat and overcoat. Daughter Denise, raised in this nutty household, is more than a bit weak in the head, but far from weak in will...