Word: viciousness
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WHILE THE MOST SUCCESSFUL young dealers may be venal and vicious, at least some of them have first-rate intellects that in a better environment could have been put to healthier use. "What is really frightening," says Al Schuman, director of Washington's probation program, "is that the kids who are selling these drugs are the bright youngsters, the articulate ones. They understand how to work the system. They can keep track of money, and they know how to run a business. It's almost a corporate mentality...
Anyone who loves books knows how hard it is to throw even one of them away, even one that is silly or stupid or vicious and full of lies. How much more criminal, how much more a sin against consciousness, to burn a book. A question then: What if one were to gather from the corners of the earth all the existing copies of Mein Kampf and make a bonfire of them? Would that be an act of virtue? Or of evil...
Sometimes it seems that the right books never get burnt. But the world has its quota of idiotic and vicious people just as it has its supplies of books that are vicious, trashy and witless. Books can eventually be as mortal as people -- the acids in the paper eat them, the bindings decay and at last they crumble in one's hands. But their ambition anyway is to outlast the flesh. Books have a kind of enshrining counterlife. One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of words and books...
Remember the box the official whiffle ball came in? The diagrams on the outside of the box showed in quick easy steps how to throw an inside curveball, how to hit the outside corner and how to unleash the vicious slider...
...also has multiple amusing moments, usually when Tad Allagash is in tow. In one particularly funny scene, the pair release a vicious ferret in the office of Jamie's former boss while the fiction editor who has rejected his stories falls flat-on-his-face drunk before an armor ornament. And all of Jamie's forays into the Manhattan night are funny in their pathetic way, and this is precisely the sort of humor that...