Word: showman
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...Part Showman, Part Salesman...
...rounds he would lay back, content with controlling the other fighter and enjoying himself. From time to time, he would challenge his opponent to take a shot at his unprotected chin and then smother the billow, accompanying the defensive maneuver with an offensive flurry of his own. A showman, as well as a master of ring psychology, Johnson converted a fight from a contest into a personal exhibition. He would defeat his opponents only after he had made them feel and appear totally unnecessary. In effect, he was reversing the traditional roles in the relationship of the black fighter...
...piled up a long bill of critical complaints that he was sentimental, arch and melodramatic; that he would never do what he could merely overdo. In recent decades, on the other hand, critics have rescued him from his earlier reputation as a hearthside moralist and improvising Toby-jug showman. Readers are now ready to acknowledge with Wilson that Dickens "leaps the century and speaks to our fears, our violence, our trust in the absurd, more than any other English Victorian writer." It no longer seems so far from the chancery court in Bleak House to Kafka's trial...
...Showman or Shaman. In her last years, Aimee shrewdly retouched her public image by sending about 2,000,000 Bibles to servicemen and calling down biblical plagues on the Axis powers ("How many of you would like to see Hitler covered with boils from head to foot?") But her heart really wasn't in it any more, and on Sept. 27, 1944, she died of an overdose of barbiturates...
Suicide? Even in death Aimee kept the public guessing. That was her style-and perhaps her privilege. It should hardly be a biographer's privilege, but Thomas claims it. He chooses to see her as a showman; but she was also a shaman, one of the charged and chosen few in whom the divine and the demonic hold alarming dialogue. There was a chance here to deep-psych a deplorable genius and put calipers to the phenomenon of religious fervor. Because Thomas passed it up, Aimee emerges as a personality who overflows the scope of the book...