Word: heroic
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Sadistic & Sick. Less clear and distinctly alien is the rationale for Nunne's sadistic murders, all of which occur discreetly offstage. Novelist Wilson's argument is that crime is a thirst for freedom, a chance to wrest a heroic identity from a world of regimented boredom and blurring mediocrity. In a sick society, the superman becomes a monster. A trip to the morgue finally opens Gerard's eyes to the monstrosity of Nunne, but not before the reader has suffered much quasi-Nietzschean chatter to the effect that "if a man could kill all his illusions...
...this weird spiritualization of cash ("Money is the root of all good") is perhaps only an outward and visible sign. The real point of objectivism is rousing unembarrassed self-interest. For the best man is a tough-minded egoist, "a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." Firmly convinced that her own one absolute is reason, Author Rand has gone so far as to boast: "I have never had an emotion that I couldn't account for." Less fortunate people...
...Brandon), made in 1952 but only recently pried out of a Tokyo film vault by an enterprising U.S. distributor, has long been acclaimed by film buffs as perhaps the finest achievement of Japan's most vigorously gifted moviemaker: Akira (Rashomon) Kurosawa. The judgment is difficult to dispute. Despite heroic defects-and partly because of them-Ikiru ("To Live") is a masterwork of burning social conscience and hard-eyed psychological realism: the step-by-step, lash-by-Iash, nail-by-nail examination of the Calvary of a common...
...previous volume, has succeeded, and for the moment at least he is well-behaved. When he visits London in 1772 without his wife, he is tempted by "a variety of fine girls, genteelly dressed, all wearing Venus's girdle, all inviting me to amorous intercourse." But with a heroic mustering of conscience, he resists the flourish of strumpets and confines himself to conversation and claret...
...Lytton Strachey's lesser portraits of eminent Victorians. British Author Arthur Calder-Marshall has done the best biography yet of the self-made sage of sex. It is not Author Calder-Marshall's purpose to debunk, but nearness lends disenchantment with a man like Ellis. The heroic side is that, leading from utter weakness, Ellis helped win such a signal victory for the study of sexual deviations as to rob posterity of its need...