Word: monomaniac
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...fostered by training in Paris in the 1870s, at the teaching atelier of Emile Carolus-Duran. Very much the maestro and dandy, Carolus-Duran focused his method on a near monomaniac attention to direct tonal painting, almost the opposite of color-based Impressionism. "Velazquez, Velazquez, Velazquez," he intoned, "ceaselessly study Velazquez." And from that study, Sargent got three of the major traits of his style. The first was a consummate skill in rendering objects and people bathed in space and low light. The second was its apparent straightforwardness--its ability to make a gesture count, to "knock in" the folds...
John Laroche is a serial monomaniac who learns everything about Ice Age fossils; then chucks fossils for orchids, becomes a celebrated breeder, then a thief of wild orchids; and finally turns his back on the plant world and its obsessed hobbyists and dives into computers. As he explains to the author of this loose-jointed but absorbing account, "When I was a baby I probably got exposed to something that mutated me, and now I'm incredibly smart." Writer Orlean, at any rate, is a superb tour guide through the loony subculture of Florida's orchid fanciers, and a writer...
...days on the sailing circuit, Turner had struck some of those who know him as a joyless monomaniac who pursued achievement not out of passion for the undertaking but out of a tortured focus on the finish line. "He told me 20 times that he never liked sailing," says Wussler. "He said, 'You know, Bob, I got cold and I got wet.' He was more in love with just winning." These days Turner talks about the "Zen experience" of fly-fishing. He has stopped pacing around his home and office (Wussler once counted 74 consecutive circles). And when...
...think that Jackson was a monomaniac who refused to accept defeat gracefully. You can also believe that other Black leaders who have recently moved up the political ranks--such as newly-elected Governor L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia--have made Jackson's day of "outsider politics" a thing of the past...
Finally, we must recognize in Lasch that terrifying phenomenon, the after-dinner monomaniac--a specimen who could, by stricter regulation of dangerous technology, be kept from the typewriter entirely. He is the sort of talker, so family in the horror-pitted fields of family life, on whom one vomited at three years, old, listened to at seven, and ignored at ten. Does Lasch find it easy to lead a psychologically sound and theoretically consistent life? Or has he found, on the contrary, that humility, intellectual generosity, and a too-fitful wisdom keep breaking...