Word: paranoia
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What these acolytes are really seeking is moral purity, says Glassner. Proper eating and exercise, he writes, have become "moral acts." Such is the paranoia about staying well that, in his view, Americans have reverted to "some of the least appealing beliefs found in so-called primitive societies." Illness, for example, is viewed not as a natural process but the result of immoral action. Explains Glassner: "We suspect the illness was the person's own fault: he or she should have exercised or eaten properly...
...disease wreaks mental and emotional havoc on those in contact with the diseased. At Risk is a novel with a message: with such a sweeping affect, the virus can only be stopped if we work together and not against each other to educate the ignorant and fight the paranoia and irrationality that has infected our society...
Stoppard, whose plays at minimum offer glorious wordplay and the shimmering surface of what seems to be Big Ideas, is at his funniest and saddest in Hapgood. This one is about physics, espionage, thriller novels, superpower paranoia, Star Wars technology, defectors, conflicts between work and homelife, and the possibilities for flimflammery in employing three sets of twins. The author's ardent anti-Communism seems to have evolved into a world- weariness reminiscent of John le Carre, in which the two camps of the cold war are morally equivalent players of a pointless, deadly game...
...years ago, Beverly Bartek of Lincoln, Neb., drowned her infant daughter in the kitchen sink two days after her physician told her that her moodiness and paranoia were the results of the baby blues. Angela Thompson had hallucinations after the birth of her first child, jumped off a bridge and was taken to a mental hospital. Still, when she became pregnant with her second child, she notes, "my doctor said, 'Just take it easy. I see no reason why it should happen again...
...gusts and swoons of excitement, he is, as one of his actress lovers tells him, a "great, big, Grade A, ignorant fool." Nor is he a wholly attractive fellow. His sex life is a series of not so magnificent obsessions; like his idol, he deserts his children. Irritatingly, a paranoia starts to < flare whenever he loses what he desperately wants: "control, total control...