Word: manichaean
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Reagan's Manichaean view of a struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness is both old-fashioned and yet also very much back in fashion in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He has been urging a hard line throughout his political career, and based his nearly successful challenge to Gerald Ford in 1976 largely on opposition to détente. Now he feels that the mood of the country has at last caught up with him. Reagan has said over and over that the twin pillars of his foreign policy will...
...people hate me so?" Kennedy asked New York Post Publisher Dorothy Schiff in 1965. Bobby seems to have been honestly bewildered by this question up to the moment of the assassination that he expected ("Sooner or later," he told one friend, "sooner or later"). Schlesinger's Manichaean fable of a lonely R.F.K. crossing swords with the forces of darkness does not fully explain the passions that this remarkable politician stirred...
Castle is one of Greene's patented Manichaean depressives, those saintly sinners whose jobs (crime, the priest hood, spying) allow the author to compose variations on his favorite themes: the pervasiveness of evil and the saving graces of kindness, love and even disloyalty. For Greene, disloyalty to institutions that threaten his ideals of individualism and humanism is a privilege, if not a right...
...genre has twin traditions: Great Bad Writing and Great Good Writing. In the Manichaean world of Great Bad Books, evil is always more compelling than heroism. Such works as John Buchan's The 39 Steps construct elaborate international conspiracies; Sax Rohmer's exemplary Fu Manchu series features a supervillain "with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race . . . the Yellow Peril incarnate." From there it is only a bullet's journey to Ian Fleming's Doctor...
...Rosenbergs' trial and execution were a passionate chapter in an overheated era. Even now, 24 years after their deaths, questions about the couple's guilt or innocence quickly grow heated. Manias stalked the land in the "50s; public and private life had the quality of a Manichaean morality play. Coover knows this, presents all the evidence, and then denies his book the ability to touch hearts or minds instead of nerves. What might have been a long, compassionate look becomes a protracted sneer. Paul Gray