Archive:Article of the Week

The Article of the Week is an article chosen by vote among Citizens as exemplifying various qualities we like to see in a Citizendium article; see our article standards. It is chosen each week by vote in a manner similar to that of its sister project, the New Draft of the Week

Add New Nominees Here

To add a new nominee or vote for an existing nominee, click edit for this section and follow the instructions

Table of Nominees

Nominated article	Supporters	Specialist supporters	Score
Social capital	Roger Lohmann 02:33, 6 June 2010 (UTC)		1
New nominee name goes here

Transclusion of the above nominees (to be done by an Administrator)

• Transclude each of the nominees in the above "Table of Nominees" as per the instructions at Template:Featured Article Candidate.
• Then add the transcluded article to the list in the next section below, using the {{Featured Article Candidate}} template.

View Current Transcluded Nominees (after they have been transcluded by an Administrator)

The next article (or draft) of the week will be the article with the most votes at 1 AM UTC on Thursday, 24 June, 2010.

Text in this section is transcluded from the respective Citizendium entries and may change when these are edited.

Nominated article	Supporters	Specialist supporters	Score
Richard Condon: (1915 – 1996) A prolific and popular American political novelist whose satiric works were generally presented in the form of thrillers or semi-thrillers. [e] The metadata subpage is missing. You can start it via filling in this form or by following the instructions that come up after clicking on the [show] link to the right. Do you see this on PREVIEW? then SAVE! before following a link. To find out more about the use of metadata for the management of Citizendium pages, see CZ:Metadata. You may see this box for one of two reasons. Either: A - New page has been created, or subpages template was added to an existing page B - Cluster move is in progress Click either the A or B link for further instructions. [Feel free to recommend improvements to the text or links in this template] A - For a New Cluster use the following directions Subpages format requires a metadata page. Using the following instructions will complete the process of creating this article's subpages. Click the blue "metadata template" link below to create the page. On the edit page that appears paste in the article's title across from "pagename =". You might also fill out the checklist part of the form. Ignore the rest. For background, see Using the Subpages template Don't worry--you'll get the hang of it right away. Remember to hit Save! the "metadata template". However, you can create articles without subpages. Just delete the {{subpages}} template from the top of this page and this prompt will disappear. :) Don't feel obligated to use subpages, it's more important that you write sentences, which you can always do without writing fancy code. [Feel free to recommend improvements to the text or links in this template] B - For a Cluster Move use the following directions The metadata template should be moved to the new name as the first step. Please revert this move and start by using the Move Cluster link at the top left of the talk page. The name prior to this move can be found at the following link. [Feel free to recommend improvements to the text or links in this template] Richard Condon and friend on the back cover of Bandicoot, 1979. Richard Thomas Condon (March 18, 1915, New York, New York – April 9, 1996, Dallas, Texas) was a prolific and popular American political novelist whose satiric works were generally presented in the form of thrillers or semi-thrillers. More than being particularly clever genre works, however, all 26 books were written in a style nearly always instantly recognizable as Condon's, while their focus was almost always obsessively directed at monetary greed and political corruption. Fast-moving and easily accessible, they generally combined elements of political satire, bare-knuckled outrage at the greed and corruption of those in power, and were written with extravagant characterizations and a uniquely sparkling and frequently humorous style. Condon himself once said: "Every book I've ever written has been about abuse of power. I feel very strongly about that. I'd like people to know how deeply their politicians wrong them." Condon occasionally achieved bestseller status, and many of his books were made into films, but today he is primarily remembered for two of his works: an early book, The Manchurian Candidate of 1959, and, many years later, for four novels about a family of New York gangsters named Prizzi. Basic theme throughout Condon's books In Mile High, his eighth novel, one primarily about how a single spectacularly ruthless gangster named Eddie West imposes Prohibition upon an unwary American populace, Condon sums up the theme of all his books in a single angry cri de coeur: "Prohibition fused the amateurism and catch-as-catch-can national tendencies of the early days of the republic with a more modern, highly organized lust for violence and the quick buck. It fused the need to massacre twelve hundred thousand American Indians and ten million American buffalo, the lynching bees, the draft riots, bread riots, gold riots and race riots, the constant wars, the largest rats in the biogest slums, boxing and football, the loudest music, the most strident and exploitative press with the entire wonderful promise of tomorrow and tomorrow, always dragging the great nation downward into greater violence and more unnecessary deaths, into newer and more positive celebration of nonlife, all so that the savage, simple-minded people might be educated into greater frenzies of understanding that power and money are the only desirable objects for this life." "Manchurian Candidate" Although not perhaps actually originated by Condon himself, his use of "the Manchurian Candidate" made that phrase a part of the English language. Frank Rich, for example, in his column in the "Sunday Opinion" of The New York Times of August 17, 2008, writes about Barack Obama with a reference to both a well-known actress and a well-known plot element in the first movie version of Condon's 1959 book: "[Obama's] been done in by that ad with Britney [Spears] and Paris [Hilton] and a new international crisis that allows [John] McCain to again flex his Manchurian Candidate military cred. Let the neocoms identify a new battleground for igniting World War III... and McCain gets with the program as if Angela Lansbury has just dealt him the Queen of Hearts". "The fiction of information" Condon's works are difficult to categorize precisely: A 1971 Time magazine review declared that, "Condon was never a satirist: he was a riot in a satire factory. He raged at Western civilization and every last one of its works. He decorticated the Third Reich, cheese fanciers, gossip columnists and the Hollywood star system with equal and total frenzy." The headline of his obituary in The New York Times called him a "political novelist", but went on to say that, "Novelist is too limited a word to encompass the world of Mr. Condon. He was also a visionary, a darkly comic conjurer, a student of American mythology and a master of conspiracy theories, as vividly demonstrated in 'The Manchurian Candidate.'" Although his books combined many different elements, including occasional outright fantasy and science fiction, they were, above all, written to entertain the general public. He had, however, a genuine disdain, outrage, and even hatred for many of the mainstream political corruptions that he found so prevalent in American life. In a 1977 quotation, he said that: "...people are being manipulated, exploited, murdered by their servants, who have convinced these savage, simple-minded populations that they are their masters, and that it hurts the head, if one thinks. People accept servants as masters. My novels are merely entertaining persuasions to get the people to think in other categories." With his long lists of absurd trivia and "mania for absolute details", Condon was, along with Ian Fleming, one of the early exemplars of those called by Pete Hamill in a New York Times review, "the practitioners of what might be called the New Novelism... Condon applies a dense web of facts to fiction.... There might really be two kinds of fiction: the fiction of sensibility and the fiction of information... As a practitioner of the fiction of information, no one else comes close to him." Quirks and characteristics Condon attacked his targets wholeheartedly but with a uniquely original style and wit that made almost any paragraph from one of his books instantly recognizable. Reviewing one of his works in the International Herald Tribune, the well-known playwright George Axelrod (The Seven-Year Itch, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter), who had collaborated with Condon on the screenplay for the film adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate, wrote: "The arrival of a new novel by Richard Condon is like an invitation to a party.... the sheer gusto of the prose, the madness of his similes, the lunacy of his metaphors, his infectious, almost child-like joy in composing complex sentences that go bang at the end in the manner of exploding cigars is both exhilarating and as exhausting as any good party ought to be." Metaphors and similes From his 1975 novel, Money Is Love, comes a fine example of the "lunacy of his metaphors": "Mason took in enough cannabis smoke to allow a Lipan Apache manipulating a blanket over it to transmit the complete works of Tennyson." The Manchurian Candidate offers: "The effects of the narcotics, techniques, and suggestions... achieved a result that approximated the impact an entire twenty-five-cent jar of F. W. Woolworth vanishing cream might have on vanishing an aircraft carrier of the Forrestal class when rubbed into the armor plate." Lists and trivia Condon was also enamored of long lists of detailed trivia that, while at least marginally pertinent to the subject at hand, are almost always an exercise in gleeful exaggeration and joyful spirits. In An Infinity of Mirrors, for instance, those in attendance of the funeral of a famous French actor and notable lover are delineated as: Seven ballerinas of an amazing spectrum of ages were at graveside. Actresses of films, opera, music halls, the theatre, radio, carnivals, circuses, pantomimes, and lewd exhibitions mourned in the front line. There were also society leaders, lady scientists, women politicians, mannequins, couturières, Salvation Army lassies, all but one of his wives, a lady wrestler, a lady matador, twenty-three lady painters, four lady sculptors, a car-wash attendant, shopgirls, shoplifters, shoppers, and the shopped; a zoo assistant, two choir girls, a Métro attendant from the terminal at the Bois de Vincennes, four beauty-contest winners, a chambermaid; the mothers of children, the mothers of men, the grandmothers of children and the grandmothers of men; and the general less specialized, female public-at-large which had come from eleven European countries, women perhaps whom he had only pinched or kissed absent-mindedly while passing through his busy life. They attended twenty-eight hundred and seventy strong, plus eleven male friends of the deceased. Writing about The Whisper of the Axe in the daily book review column of Friday, May 21, 1976, in the New York Times, Richard R. Lingeman praised the book in particular and Condon in general for his "extravagance of invention unique with him." Not everyone was as exhilarated by Condon's antics, however. In a long Times Sunday review just two days after Lingeman's, Roger Sale excoriated Condon as a writer of "how-to books" in general, this book in particular, and Condon's habit of using lists: "A lot of it is done with numbers abritrarily chosen to falsely simulate precision." Real-life names in his books All of Condon's books have, to an unknown degree, the names of real people in them as characters, generally very minor or peripheral. The most common, which appears in all of his books, is some variation of Franklin M. Heller. Among them are F.M. Heller, Frank Heller, Franz Heller, Marxie Heller, and F. Marx Heller. The real-life Heller was apparently a television director in New York City in the 1950s, '60s, and 70s, who initially lived on Long Island and then moved to a house on Rockrimmon Road in Stamford, Connecticut. Beginning with Mile High in 1969, mentions of a Rockrimmon Road or Rockrimmon House also began to appear regularly in the novels. Late in life Heller grew a thick white beard and became a devotee of needlework—both traits that the fictional Hellers shared, sometimes to ludicrous effect, as when a battle-hardened Admiral Heller is depicted issuing orders while absorbed in needlework. The real-life Heller made one needlework depiction of the manor house in Ireland in which Condon was living at the time. In Prizzi's Honor, Marxie Heller is a mobster and murder victim; in Prizzi's Family, Franklin Heller is the mayor of New York City; in Prizzi's Glory, the Heller Administration is mentioned, implying that he is the president of the United States. Condon was a great friend of actor Allan Melvin, having written a nightclub act for him. Condon later became a publicist for The Phil Silvers Show ("Sgt. Bilko"), on which Melvin played Cpl. Henshaw. Melvin's name shows up in several Condon books, most prominently as hitman Al (the Plumber) Melvini in "Prizzi's Honor" (a play on Melvin's "Al the Plumber" character in Liquid-Plumr commercials.) In The Manchurian Candidate, with the exception of Marco, Shaw and Mavole, all of Marco's platoon members are named for the cast/crew of "Bilko": (Nat) Hiken, (Maurice) Gosfield, (Jimmy) Little, (Phil) Silvers, (Allan) Melvin, (Mickey) Freeman and (Harvey) Lembeck. In Prizzi's Honor, a New York City policeman named McCarry is mentioned once; the political thriller writer Charles McCarry was a friend of Condon's and, as a former operative of the C.I.A., was a occasional source of expertise in the field of espionage for Condon. In a number of books a character named Keifetz appears, named apparently for Norman Keifetz, a New York City author who wrote a novel about a major league baseball player called The Sensation—that novel was dedicated to Condon. A.H. Weiler, a film critic for the New York Times, was another friend of Condon's who made several fictional appearances, usually as Abraham Weiler but sometimes as a Dr. Abe Weiler. In The Oldest Confession, a character has lunch in a Paris bistro and briefly meets two people playing chess at the bar, "Buchwald and Nolan, newspaper and airline peons respectively". Buchwald is certainly Art Buchwald, the celebrated newspaper columnist and humorist, who, at the time of the book's publication, was still working for The International Herald-Tribune, which was published in Paris, where Condon had also lived during the 1950s. The identity of Nolan, however, remains a mystery. Career in films For many years a Hollywood publicity man for Walt Disney and other studios, Condon took up writing relatively late in life and his first novel, The Oldest Confession, was not published until he was 43. The demands of his career with United Artists—promoting dreadful movies such as The Pride and the Passion and A King and Four Queens—led to a series of bleeding ulcers and a determination to do something else. His next book, The Manchurian Candidate, which combined all the elements that defined his works for the next 30 years—nefarious conspiracies, satire, black humor, outrage at political and financial corruption in the American scene, breath-taking elements from thrillers and spy fiction, horrific and grotesque violence, and an obsession with the minutiae of food, drink, and fast living—quickly made him, for a few years at least, the center of a cult devoted to his works. As he quickly produced more and more books with the same central themes, however, his cult following fell away and his critical reputation diminished. But over the next three decades Condon continued to pull occasional surprises from his literary hat with books such as Mile High, Winter Kills, and the first of the Prizzi books, Prizzi's Honor, that returned him to favor, both with the critics and the book-buying public. Of his numerous books that were turned into Hollywood movies, The Manchurian Candidate was filmed twice. The first version, in 1962, which starred Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury, followed the book with great fidelity, and is now generally recognized as one of the greatest films of all time. At the time, however, because of its perceived parallels with the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, it was quickly removed from circulation and it was not until its re-release in 1998 that it began to garner a general but belated acclaim. Janet Maslin, writing in 1996 in The New York Times, said that it was "arguably the most chilling piece of cold war paranoia ever committed to film, yet by now it has developed a kind of innocence." The Keener's Manual Beginning with his first book, The Oldest Confession, Condon frequently prefaced his novels with excerpts of verse from a so-called Keener's Manual; these epigraphs foreshadowed the theme of the book or, in several instances, gave the book its title. The Keener's Manual, however, was a fictional invention by Condon and does not actually exist. A "keen" is a "lamentation for the dead uttered in a loud wailing voice or sometimes in a wordless cry" and a "keener" is a professional mourner, usually a woman in Ireland, who "utters the keen... at a wake or funeral." Five of Condon's first six books derived their titles the fictional manual, the only exception being his most famous book, The Manchurian Candidate. The epigraph in The Manchurian Candidate, however, "I am you and you are me /and what have we done to each other?" is a recurring theme in earlier Condon's books: in various forms it also appears as dialog in both The Oldest Confession and Some Angry Angel. Among other epigraphs, the last line of "The riches I bring you /Crowding and shoving, /Are the envy of princes: /A talent for loving." is the title of Condon's fourth novel. His fifth and sixth novels, An Infinity of Mirrors and Any God Will Do, also derive their titles from excerpts of the manual. Years later, Condon's 1988 novel Prizzi's Glory also had an epigraph from the manual, the first one in at least a dozen books. Plagiarism charge In 1998 a California software engineer noticed several paragraphs in The Manchurian Candidate that appeared nearly identical to portions of the celebrated 1934 novel I, Claudius by the English writer Robert Graves. She wrote about the apparent plagiarism on her website but her discovery went unnoticed by most of the world until Adair Lara, a longtime San Francisco Chronicle staff writer, wrote a lengthy article about the accusation in 2003. Reprinting the paragraphs in question, she also solicited the opinion of a British "forensic linguist", who concluded that Condon had unquestionably plagiarized at least two paragraphs of Graves's work. By this time, however, more than seven years had passed since Condon's death and Lara's article also failed to generate any literary interest outside the Chronicle. Curiously enough, in Some Angry Angel, the book that followed The Manchurian Candidate, Condon makes a direct reference to Graves. In a long, convoluted passage on page 25 Condon reflects on "mistresses" and their apparently peripheral relationship, at least to the reader, to Graves's writings about "Major Male" Deities and "Major Female" Deities. As Angel was published only a year after Candidate, there is no question, therefore, about Condon's familiarity with the works of Robert Graves. Works—all novels except as noted The Oldest Confession, Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York, 1958, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-8662; Longman, London, 1959, as The Happy Thieves The Manchurian Candidate, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1959, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 59-8533 Some Angry Angel: A Mid-Century Faerie Tale, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1960, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-8826 A Talent for Loving; or, The Great Cowboy Race, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1961, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:61-10467 An Infinity of Mirrors, Random House, New York, 1964, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-17935 Any God Will Do, Random House, New York, 1964, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-21462 The Ecstasy Business, The Dial Press, New York, 1967, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-14467 Mile High, The Dial Press, New York, 1969, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-80497 The Vertical Smile, The Dial Press, New York, 1971, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 978-0803796133 Arigato (1972) The Mexican Stove (1973)—cookbook co-written with his daughter Wendy Bennett And Then We Moved to Rossenarra: or, The Art of Emigrating, The Dial Press, New York, 1973, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: PS3553.0487z5—memoir Winter Kills, The Dial Press, New York, 1974, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: PZ4.C746 Wi PS3553.O487 The Star-Spangled Crunch (1974) Money Is Love (1975) The Whisper of the Axe (1976) The Abandoned Woman (1977) Death of a Politician (1978) Bandicoot (1979) The Entwining (1981) Prizzi's Honor (1982) A Trembling upon Rome (1983) Prizzi's Family (1986) Prizzi's Glory (1988) Emperor of America, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1990, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: PS3553.O487 E47 1990 The Final Addiction (1991) The Venerable Bead (1992) Prizzi's Money (1993) Films adapted from Condon novels The Happy Thieves, from The Oldest Confession, 1962 The Manchurian Candidate (1962 film), 1962 A Talent for Loving (film), 1969 Winter Kills (film), 1979 Prizzi's Honor (film), 1985 The Manchurian Candidate (2004 film), 2004 References See also Crime fiction/Catalog of prominent writers (Read more...)	Peter Schmitt 23:08, 6 May 2010 (UTC)		1

Current Winner (to be selected and implemented by an Administrator)

To change, click edit and follow the instructions, or see documentation at {{Featured Article}}.

The metadata subpage is missing. You can start it via filling in this form or by following the instructions that come up after clicking on the [show] link to the right.

Do you see this on PREVIEW? then SAVE! before following a link. To find out more about the use of metadata for the management of Citizendium pages, see CZ:Metadata. You may see this box for one of two reasons. Either: A - New page has been created, or subpages template was added to an existing page B - Cluster move is in progress Click either the A or B link for further instructions. [Feel free to recommend improvements to the text or links in this template] A - For a New Cluster use the following directions Subpages format requires a metadata page. Using the following instructions will complete the process of creating this article's subpages. Click the blue "metadata template" link below to create the page. On the edit page that appears paste in the article's title across from "pagename =". You might also fill out the checklist part of the form. Ignore the rest. For background, see Using the Subpages template Don't worry--you'll get the hang of it right away. Remember to hit Save! the "metadata template". However, you can create articles without subpages. Just delete the {{subpages}} template from the top of this page and this prompt will disappear. :) Don't feel obligated to use subpages, it's more important that you write sentences, which you can always do without writing fancy code. [Feel free to recommend improvements to the text or links in this template] B - For a Cluster Move use the following directions The metadata template should be moved to the new name as the first step. Please revert this move and start by using the Move Cluster link at the top left of the talk page. The name prior to this move can be found at the following link. [Feel free to recommend improvements to the text or links in this template]

---

Richard Condon and friend on the back cover of Bandicoot, 1979.

Richard Thomas Condon (March 18, 1915, New York, New York – April 9, 1996, Dallas, Texas) was a prolific and popular American political novelist whose satiric works were generally presented in the form of thrillers or semi-thrillers. More than being particularly clever genre works, however, all 26 books were written in a style nearly always instantly recognizable as Condon's, while their focus was almost always obsessively directed at monetary greed and political corruption. Fast-moving and easily accessible, they generally combined elements of political satire, bare-knuckled outrage at the greed and corruption of those in power, and were written with extravagant characterizations and a uniquely sparkling and frequently humorous style. Condon himself once said: "Every book I've ever written has been about abuse of power. I feel very strongly about that. I'd like people to know how deeply their politicians wrong them." Condon occasionally achieved bestseller status, and many of his books were made into films, but today he is primarily remembered for two of his works: an early book, The Manchurian Candidate of 1959, and, many years later, for four novels about a family of New York gangsters named Prizzi.

Basic theme throughout Condon's books

In Mile High, his eighth novel, one primarily about how a single spectacularly ruthless gangster named Eddie West imposes Prohibition upon an unwary American populace, Condon sums up the theme of all his books in a single angry cri de coeur:

"Prohibition fused the amateurism and catch-as-catch-can national tendencies of the early days of the republic with a more modern, highly organized lust for violence and the quick buck. It fused the need to massacre twelve hundred thousand American Indians and ten million American buffalo, the lynching bees, the draft riots, bread riots, gold riots and race riots, the constant wars, the largest rats in the biogest slums, boxing and football, the loudest music, the most strident and exploitative press with the entire wonderful promise of tomorrow and tomorrow, always dragging the great nation downward into greater violence and more unnecessary deaths, into newer and more positive celebration of nonlife, all so that the savage, simple-minded people might be educated into greater frenzies of understanding that power and money are the only desirable objects for this life."

"Manchurian Candidate"

Although not perhaps actually originated by Condon himself, his use of "the Manchurian Candidate" made that phrase a part of the English language. Frank Rich, for example, in his column in the "Sunday Opinion" of The New York Times of August 17, 2008, writes about Barack Obama with a reference to both a well-known actress and a well-known plot element in the first movie version of Condon's 1959 book:

"[Obama's] been done in by that ad with Britney [Spears] and Paris [Hilton] and a new international crisis that allows [John] McCain to again flex his Manchurian Candidate military cred. Let the neocoms identify a new battleground for igniting World War III... and McCain gets with the program as if Angela Lansbury has just dealt him the Queen of Hearts".

"The fiction of information"

Condon's works are difficult to categorize precisely: A 1971 Time magazine review declared that, "Condon was never a satirist: he was a riot in a satire factory. He raged at Western civilization and every last one of its works. He decorticated the Third Reich, cheese fanciers, gossip columnists and the Hollywood star system with equal and total frenzy." The headline of his obituary in The New York Times called him a "political novelist", but went on to say that, "Novelist is too limited a word to encompass the world of Mr. Condon. He was also a visionary, a darkly comic conjurer, a student of American mythology and a master of conspiracy theories, as vividly demonstrated in 'The Manchurian Candidate.'" Although his books combined many different elements, including occasional outright fantasy and science fiction, they were, above all, written to entertain the general public. He had, however, a genuine disdain, outrage, and even hatred for many of the mainstream political corruptions that he found so prevalent in American life. In a 1977 quotation, he said that:

"...people are being manipulated, exploited, murdered by their servants, who have convinced these savage, simple-minded populations that they are their masters, and that it hurts the head, if one thinks. People accept servants as masters. My novels are merely entertaining persuasions to get the people to think in other categories."

With his long lists of absurd trivia and "mania for absolute details", Condon was, along with Ian Fleming, one of the early exemplars of those called by Pete Hamill in a New York Times review, "the practitioners of what might be called the New Novelism... Condon applies a dense web of facts to fiction.... There might really be two kinds of fiction: the fiction of sensibility and the fiction of information... As a practitioner of the fiction of information, no one else comes close to him."

Quirks and characteristics

Condon attacked his targets wholeheartedly but with a uniquely original style and wit that made almost any paragraph from one of his books instantly recognizable. Reviewing one of his works in the International Herald Tribune, the well-known playwright George Axelrod (The Seven-Year Itch, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter), who had collaborated with Condon on the screenplay for the film adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate, wrote:

"The arrival of a new novel by Richard Condon is like an invitation to a party.... the sheer gusto of the prose, the madness of his similes, the lunacy of his metaphors, his infectious, almost child-like joy in composing complex sentences that go bang at the end in the manner of exploding cigars is both exhilarating and as exhausting as any good party ought to be."

Metaphors and similes

From his 1975 novel, Money Is Love, comes a fine example of the "lunacy of his metaphors": "Mason took in enough cannabis smoke to allow a Lipan Apache manipulating a blanket over it to transmit the complete works of Tennyson." The Manchurian Candidate offers:

"The effects of the narcotics, techniques, and suggestions... achieved a result that approximated the impact an entire twenty-five-cent jar of F. W. Woolworth vanishing cream might have on vanishing an aircraft carrier of the Forrestal class when rubbed into the armor plate."

Lists and trivia

Condon was also enamored of long lists of detailed trivia that, while at least marginally pertinent to the subject at hand, are almost always an exercise in gleeful exaggeration and joyful spirits. In An Infinity of Mirrors, for instance, those in attendance of the funeral of a famous French actor and notable lover are delineated as:

Seven ballerinas of an amazing spectrum of ages were at graveside. Actresses of films, opera, music halls, the theatre, radio, carnivals, circuses, pantomimes, and lewd exhibitions mourned in the front line. There were also society leaders, lady scientists, women politicians, mannequins, couturières, Salvation Army lassies, all but one of his wives, a lady wrestler, a lady matador, twenty-three lady painters, four lady sculptors, a car-wash attendant, shopgirls, shoplifters, shoppers, and the shopped; a zoo assistant, two choir girls, a Métro attendant from the terminal at the Bois de Vincennes, four beauty-contest winners, a chambermaid; the mothers of children, the mothers of men, the grandmothers of children and the grandmothers of men; and the general less specialized, female public-at-large which had come from eleven European countries, women perhaps whom he had only pinched or kissed absent-mindedly while passing through his busy life. They attended twenty-eight hundred and seventy strong, plus eleven male friends of the deceased.

Writing about The Whisper of the Axe in the daily book review column of Friday, May 21, 1976, in the New York Times, Richard R. Lingeman praised the book in particular and Condon in general for his "extravagance of invention unique with him."

Not everyone was as exhilarated by Condon's antics, however. In a long Times Sunday review just two days after Lingeman's, Roger Sale excoriated Condon as a writer of "how-to books" in general, this book in particular, and Condon's habit of using lists: "A lot of it is done with numbers abritrarily chosen to falsely simulate precision."

Real-life names in his books

All of Condon's books have, to an unknown degree, the names of real people in them as characters, generally very minor or peripheral. The most common, which appears in all of his books, is some variation of Franklin M. Heller. Among them are F.M. Heller, Frank Heller, Franz Heller, Marxie Heller, and F. Marx Heller. The real-life Heller was apparently a television director in New York City in the 1950s, '60s, and 70s, who initially lived on Long Island and then moved to a house on Rockrimmon Road in Stamford, Connecticut. Beginning with Mile High in 1969, mentions of a Rockrimmon Road or Rockrimmon House also began to appear regularly in the novels. Late in life Heller grew a thick white beard and became a devotee of needlework—both traits that the fictional Hellers shared, sometimes to ludicrous effect, as when a battle-hardened Admiral Heller is depicted issuing orders while absorbed in needlework. The real-life Heller made one needlework depiction of the manor house in Ireland in which Condon was living at the time. In Prizzi's Honor, Marxie Heller is a mobster and murder victim; in Prizzi's Family, Franklin Heller is the mayor of New York City; in Prizzi's Glory, the Heller Administration is mentioned, implying that he is the president of the United States.

Condon was a great friend of actor Allan Melvin, having written a nightclub act for him. Condon later became a publicist for The Phil Silvers Show ("Sgt. Bilko"), on which Melvin played Cpl. Henshaw. Melvin's name shows up in several Condon books, most prominently as hitman Al (the Plumber) Melvini in "Prizzi's Honor" (a play on Melvin's "Al the Plumber" character in Liquid-Plumr commercials.) In The Manchurian Candidate, with the exception of Marco, Shaw and Mavole, all of Marco's platoon members are named for the cast/crew of "Bilko": (Nat) Hiken, (Maurice) Gosfield, (Jimmy) Little, (Phil) Silvers, (Allan) Melvin, (Mickey) Freeman and (Harvey) Lembeck.

In Prizzi's Honor, a New York City policeman named McCarry is mentioned once; the political thriller writer Charles McCarry was a friend of Condon's and, as a former operative of the C.I.A., was a occasional source of expertise in the field of espionage for Condon.

In a number of books a character named Keifetz appears, named apparently for Norman Keifetz, a New York City author who wrote a novel about a major league baseball player called The Sensation—that novel was dedicated to Condon.

A.H. Weiler, a film critic for the New York Times, was another friend of Condon's who made several fictional appearances, usually as Abraham Weiler but sometimes as a Dr. Abe Weiler.

In The Oldest Confession, a character has lunch in a Paris bistro and briefly meets two people playing chess at the bar, "Buchwald and Nolan, newspaper and airline peons respectively". Buchwald is certainly Art Buchwald, the celebrated newspaper columnist and humorist, who, at the time of the book's publication, was still working for The International Herald-Tribune, which was published in Paris, where Condon had also lived during the 1950s. The identity of Nolan, however, remains a mystery.

Career in films

For many years a Hollywood publicity man for Walt Disney and other studios, Condon took up writing relatively late in life and his first novel, The Oldest Confession, was not published until he was 43. The demands of his career with United Artists—promoting dreadful movies such as The Pride and the Passion and A King and Four Queens—led to a series of bleeding ulcers and a determination to do something else.

His next book, The Manchurian Candidate, which combined all the elements that defined his works for the next 30 years—nefarious conspiracies, satire, black humor, outrage at political and financial corruption in the American scene, breath-taking elements from thrillers and spy fiction, horrific and grotesque violence, and an obsession with the minutiae of food, drink, and fast living—quickly made him, for a few years at least, the center of a cult devoted to his works. As he quickly produced more and more books with the same central themes, however, his cult following fell away and his critical reputation diminished. But over the next three decades Condon continued to pull occasional surprises from his literary hat with books such as Mile High, Winter Kills, and the first of the Prizzi books, Prizzi's Honor, that returned him to favor, both with the critics and the book-buying public.

Of his numerous books that were turned into Hollywood movies, The Manchurian Candidate was filmed twice. The first version, in 1962, which starred Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury, followed the book with great fidelity, and is now generally recognized as one of the greatest films of all time. At the time, however, because of its perceived parallels with the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, it was quickly removed from circulation and it was not until its re-release in 1998 that it began to garner a general but belated acclaim. Janet Maslin, writing in 1996 in The New York Times, said that it was "arguably the most chilling piece of cold war paranoia ever committed to film, yet by now it has developed a kind of innocence."

The Keener's Manual

Beginning with his first book, The Oldest Confession, Condon frequently prefaced his novels with excerpts of verse from a so-called Keener's Manual; these epigraphs foreshadowed the theme of the book or, in several instances, gave the book its title. The Keener's Manual, however, was a fictional invention by Condon and does not actually exist. A "keen" is a "lamentation for the dead uttered in a loud wailing voice or sometimes in a wordless cry" and a "keener" is a professional mourner, usually a woman in Ireland, who "utters the keen... at a wake or funeral."

Five of Condon's first six books derived their titles the fictional manual, the only exception being his most famous book, The Manchurian Candidate. The epigraph in The Manchurian Candidate, however, "I am you and you are me /and what have we done to each other?" is a recurring theme in earlier Condon's books: in various forms it also appears as dialog in both The Oldest Confession and Some Angry Angel. Among other epigraphs, the last line of "The riches I bring you /Crowding and shoving, /Are the envy of princes: /A talent for loving." is the title of Condon's fourth novel. His fifth and sixth novels, An Infinity of Mirrors and Any God Will Do, also derive their titles from excerpts of the manual.

Years later, Condon's 1988 novel Prizzi's Glory also had an epigraph from the manual, the first one in at least a dozen books.

Plagiarism charge

In 1998 a California software engineer noticed several paragraphs in The Manchurian Candidate that appeared nearly identical to portions of the celebrated 1934 novel I, Claudius by the English writer Robert Graves. She wrote about the apparent plagiarism on her website but her discovery went unnoticed by most of the world until Adair Lara, a longtime San Francisco Chronicle staff writer, wrote a lengthy article about the accusation in 2003. Reprinting the paragraphs in question, she also solicited the opinion of a British "forensic linguist", who concluded that Condon had unquestionably plagiarized at least two paragraphs of Graves's work. By this time, however, more than seven years had passed since Condon's death and Lara's article also failed to generate any literary interest outside the Chronicle.

Curiously enough, in Some Angry Angel, the book that followed The Manchurian Candidate, Condon makes a direct reference to Graves. In a long, convoluted passage on page 25 Condon reflects on "mistresses" and their apparently peripheral relationship, at least to the reader, to Graves's writings about "Major Male" Deities and "Major Female" Deities. As Angel was published only a year after Candidate, there is no question, therefore, about Condon's familiarity with the works of Robert Graves.

Works—all novels except as noted

• The Oldest Confession, Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York, 1958, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-8662; Longman, London, 1959, as The Happy Thieves
• The Manchurian Candidate, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1959, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 59-8533
• Some Angry Angel: A Mid-Century Faerie Tale, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1960, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-8826
• A Talent for Loving; or, The Great Cowboy Race, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1961, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:61-10467
• An Infinity of Mirrors, Random House, New York, 1964, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-17935
• Any God Will Do, Random House, New York, 1964, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-21462
• The Ecstasy Business, The Dial Press, New York, 1967, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-14467
• Mile High, The Dial Press, New York, 1969, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-80497
• The Vertical Smile, The Dial Press, New York, 1971, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 978-0803796133
• Arigato (1972)
• The Mexican Stove (1973)—cookbook co-written with his daughter Wendy Bennett
• And Then We Moved to Rossenarra: or, The Art of Emigrating, The Dial Press, New York, 1973, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: PS3553.0487z5—memoir
• Winter Kills, The Dial Press, New York, 1974, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: PZ4.C746 Wi PS3553.O487
• The Star-Spangled Crunch (1974)
• Money Is Love (1975)
• The Whisper of the Axe (1976)
• The Abandoned Woman (1977)
• Death of a Politician (1978)
• Bandicoot (1979)
• The Entwining (1981)
• Prizzi's Honor (1982)
• A Trembling upon Rome (1983)
• Prizzi's Family (1986)
• Prizzi's Glory (1988)
• Emperor of America, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1990, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: PS3553.O487 E47 1990
• The Final Addiction (1991)
• The Venerable Bead (1992)
• Prizzi's Money (1993)

Films adapted from Condon novels

• The Happy Thieves, from The Oldest Confession, 1962

• The Manchurian Candidate (1962 film), 1962

• A Talent for Loving (film), 1969

• Winter Kills (film), 1979

• Prizzi's Honor (film), 1985

• The Manchurian Candidate (2004 film), 2004

See also

• Crime fiction/Catalog of prominent writers (Read more...)

Previous Winners

•  Natural gas [r]: A gas consisting primarily of methane (CH₄) which is found as raw natural gas in underground reservoirs, as gas associated with underground reservoirs of petroleum crude oil, as undersea methane hydrates and as coalbed methane in underground coal mines. ^[e]
•  Stairway to Heaven [r]: 1971 song written and recorded by Led Zeppelin, which became their signature tune and a centrepiece for the group's live performances. ^[e]
•  Cryptography [r]: A field at the intersection of mathematics and computer science that is concerned with the security of information, typically the confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of some message. ^[e]
•  English spellings [r]: Lists of English words showing pronunciation, and articles about letters. ^[e]
•  Folk saint [r]: A deceased person or spirit that is venerated as a saint but who has not been officially canonized by the Church. ^[e]
•  Led Zeppelin [r]: English hard rock and blues group formed in 1968, known for their albums and stage shows. ^[e]
•  Locality of reference [r]: A commonly observed pattern in memory accesses by a computer program over time. ^[e]
•  Rabbit [r]: Long-eared, short-tailed, burrowing mammals of the family Leporidae of the order Lagomorpha, found in several parts of the world. ^[e]
•  Scarborough Castle [r]: Ruined stone castle on the east coast of Yorkshire, England, begun in mid-twelfth century. ^[e] (September 3)
• The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order [r]: Add brief definition or description (August 27)
•  Mauna Kea [r]: One of the three main volcanic mountains on Hawaii, the biggest island in Hawaii (U.S. state). ^[e] (August 20)
•  Brute force attack [r]: An attempt to break a cipher by trying all possible keys; long enough keys make this impractical. ^[e] (August 13)
•  Cruiser [r]: While definitions vary with time and doctrine, a large warship capable of acting independently, as a flagship, or a major escort; capabilities include anti-air warfare, anti-surface warfare, anti-submarine warfare, land attack, and possibly ballistic missile defense ^[e] (August 5)
•  The Canterbury Tales [r]: Collection of stories in verse and prose by Geoffrey Chaucer. ^[e] (July 30)
•  Milpa agriculture [r]: A form of swidden agriculture that is practiced in Mesoamerica. Traditionally, a "milpa" plot is planted with maize, beans, and squash. ^[e] (July 23)
•  Domain Name System [r]: The Internet service which translates to and from IP addresses and domain names. ^[e] (July 16)
•  Scuticaria [r]: A genus of orchids, closely related to Bifrenaria, formed by nine showy species of cylindrical leaves, which exist in three isolated areas of South America. ^[e] (July 9)
• Torture [r]: Add brief definition or description (July 2)
•  Miltonia [r]: An orchid genus formed by nine showy epiphyte species and seven natural hybrids of Brazil, one species reaching Argentina and Paraguay. ^[e] (June 25)
•  Ancient Celtic music [r]: The music and instruments of the ancient Celts until late Antiquity. ^[e] (June 18)
•  Bifrenaria [r]: A genus of orchids formed by circa twenty species of South America, some widely cultivated because of their large and colored flowers; divided in two distinct groups, one with large flowers and short inflorescences and the other with small flowers and long inflorescences. ^[e] (June 11)
•  Halobacterium NRC-1 [r]: A microorganism from the Archaea kingdom perfectly suited for life in highly saline environments giving biologists an ideal specimen for genetic studies. ^[e] (June 4)
•  Animal [r]: A multicellular organism that feeds on other organisms, and is distinguished from plants, fungi, and unicellular organisms. ^[e] (May 28)
•  Coal [r]: a combustible, black rock formed after millions of years of heat and pressure were applied to the decayed remains of plants and organic matter in what were then swamps. ^[e] (May 21)
•  Johannes Diderik van der Waals [r]: (1837 – 1923) Dutch scientist, proposed the van der Waals equation of state for gases. ^[e] (May 7)
•  Scientific method [r]: The concept of systematic inquiry based on hypotheses and their testing in light of empirical evidence. ^[e] (Apr 14)
•  Korematsu v. United States [r]: A U.S. Supreme Court case, in which the internment of Japanese-Americans was deemed constitutional due to military necessity ^[e] (Apr 7)
•  Orchid [r]: Any plant classified under Orchidaceae, one of the largest plant families and the largest among Monocotyledons. ^[e] (Mar 31)
•  Oliver Cromwell [r]: (1599-1658) English soldier, statesman, and leader of the Puritan revolution, nicknamed "Old Ironsides". ^[e] (Mar 24)
•  Wisconsin v. Yoder [r]: Add brief definition or description (Mar 17)
•  Conventional coal-fired power plant [r]: Add brief definition or description (Mar 10)
•  Battle of the Ia Drang [r]: Add brief definition or description (Mar 3)
•  Ether (physics) [r]: Add brief definition or description (Feb 24)
•  Large-scale trickle filters [r]: Add brief definition or description (11 Feb)
•  Homeopathy [r]: Add brief definition or description (28 Jan)
•  Microeconomics [r]: Add brief definition or description (14 Jan)
•  Speech Recognition [r]: Add brief definition or description (26 Nov)
•  Mashup [r]: Add brief definition or description (19 Nov)
•  Tux [r]: Add brief definition or description (14 Oct)
•  Hydrogen bond [r]: Add brief definition or description (7 Oct)
•  Lead [r]: Add brief definition or description (1 Sept)
•  DNA [r]: Add brief definition or description (8 July)
•  Augustin-Louis_Cauchy [r]: Add brief definition or description (1 July)
•  Vasco da Gama [r]: Add brief definition or description (24 June)
•  Phosphorus [r]: Add brief definition or description (17 June)
•  Crystal Palace [r]: Add brief definition or description (10 June)
•  Gross Domestic Product [r]: Add brief definition or description (3 June)
•  RNA interference [r]: Add brief definition or description (27 May)
•  Latino history [r]: Add brief definition or description (20 May)
•  Navy Grog [r]: Add brief definition or description (13 May)
•  Systems biology [r]: Add brief definition or description (6 May)
•  Steroid [r]: Add brief definition or description (22 Apr)
•  Lebanon [r]: Add brief definition or description (15 Apr)
•  Wheat [r]: Add brief definition or description (7 Apr)
•  Benjamin Franklin [r]: Add brief definition or description (1 Apr)
•  Coherer [r]: Add brief definition or description (25 Mar)
•  U.S. Civil War [r]: Add brief definition or description (18 Mar)
•  Life [r]: Add brief definition or description (11 Mar)
•  Petroleum refining processes [r]: Add brief definition or description (4 Mar)
•  Shirley Chisholm [r]: Add brief definition or description (20 Feb)
•  Telephone Newspaper [r]: Add brief definition or description (4 Feb)
•  Wristwatch [r]: Add brief definition or description (28 Jan)
•  Korean War of 1592-1598 [r]: Add brief definition or description (21 Jan)
•  Andrew Carnegie [r]: Add brief definition or description (11 January 2008)
• Bowling [r]: Add brief definition or description (31 December 2007)
•  Architecture [r]: Add brief definition or description (December 6)
•  Civil society [r]: Add brief definition or description November 29
•  Joan of Arc [r]: Add brief definition or description (November 22)
•  Chemistry [r]: Add brief definition or description (November 15)
•  Albert Gallatin [r]: Add brief definition or description (November 8)
•  Prime number [r]: Add brief definition or description (November 1)
•  Tennis [r]: Add brief definition or description (October 25)
•  Rottweiler [r]: Add brief definition or description (October 18)
•  Theodor Lohmann [r]: Add brief definition or description (October 9)
•  William Shakespeare [r]: Add brief definition or description (October 2)
•  Edward I [r]: Add brief definition or description (September 25)
•  El Tío [r]: Add brief definition or description (September 18)
•  Scotland Yard [r]: Add brief definition or description (September 11)
•  Kilt [r]: Add brief definition or description (September 4)
•  U.S. Electoral College [r]: Add brief definition or description (August 28)
•  Butler [r]: Add brief definition or description (August 21)
•  Tony Blair [r]: Add brief definition or description (August 14)
•  Northwest Passage [r]: Add brief definition or description (August 7)
•  Literature [r]: Add brief definition or description (July 31)
•  Biology [r]: Add brief definition or description (July 25)

Rules and Procedure

Rules

• The article's status must be 0 or 1, i.e., only "Advanced Articles" may be nominated.
• Any Citizen may nominate an article.
• No Citizen may have nominated more than one article listed under "current nominees" at a time.
• The article's nominator is indicated simply by the first name in the list of votes (see below).
• At least for now--while the project is still small--you may nominate and vote for articles of which you are a main author.
• An article can be Article of the Week only once every six months. Nominated articles that have won top honors should be removed from the list.
• Comments on nominations should be made on the article's talk page.
• The list of nominees should be kept below 20, or thereabouts. Articles with very few supporters and which have not gained any new supporters in the last two weeks or so may be deleted to make room for new nominees.
• Any editor may entirely cancel the nomination of any unapproved article in his or her area of expertise if, for example, it contains obvious and embarrassing problems.

Voting

• To vote, add your name and date in the Supporters column next to an article title, after other supporters for that article, by signing <br />~~~~. (The date is necessary so that we can determine when the last vote was added.) Your vote is alloted a score of 1.
• Add your name in the Specialist supporters column only if you are an editor who is an expert about the topic in question. Your vote is alloted a score of 1 for articles which you created and a score of 2 for articles which you did not create.
• You may vote for as many articles as you wish, and each vote counts separately, but you can only nominate one at a time; see above. You could, theoretically, vote for every nominated article on the page, but this would be pointless.

Ranking

• The list of articles is sorted by number of votes first, then alphabetically.
• Admins should make sure that the votes are correctly tallied, but anyone may do this. Note that "Specialist Votes" are worth 3 points.

Updating

• Each Thursday, one of the admins listed below should move the winning article to the Current Winner section of this page, announces the winner on Citizendium-L and updates the "previous winning articles" section accordingly.
• The winning article will be the article at the top of the list (ie the one with the most votes).
• In the event of two or more having the same number of votes :
  • The article with the most specialist supporters is used. Should this fail to produce a winner, the article appearing first by English alphabetical order is used.
    
  • The remaining winning articles are guaranteed this position in the following weeks, again in alphabetical order. No further voting would take place on these, which remain at the top of the table with notices to that effect. Further nominations and voting take place to determine future winning articles for the following weeks.

Administrators

These are people who have volunteered to run this program. Their duties are (1) to ensure that this page remains "clean," e.g., as a given article garners more votes, its tally is accurately represented and it moves up the list, and (2) to place the winning article on the front page on a weekly basis. To become an administrator, you need not apply anywhere. Simply add your name below. Administrator duties are open to editors and authors alike.

• Carl Jantzen
• Todd Coles
• David E. Volk
• Milton Beychok

See Also

• CZ:New Draft of the Week
• CZ:Markup tags for partial transclusion of selected text in an article
• CZ:Monthly Write-a-Thon

|width=10% align=center style="background:#F5F5F5"|  |}