"Virtually everyone in the play is loathsome, self-interested, grasping, dishonest and corrupt," wrote Thomas Sutcliffe in The Independent.
An influential Milwaukee pharmacist speaks favorably of Hitler, while the imam at the local Islamic Center preaches of the "loathsome" self-love exhibited by the Jewish people.
Wolf's book, however, is undermined by the fact that she has rendered herself less than unreliable over the past couple of decades, with one rant more hysterical than another — Fascist America!, great sex behind the burqa!, the "Stalinist" plot against Occupy Wall Street!, and a particularly loathsome, self-victimizing and vindictive piece about the Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom.
But their loathsome self-congratulations are based at least in part on ignorance.
After a fight or after a breakup, my anxiety invites loathsome, self-defeating thoughts to pop into my mind.
It was always going to be high risk, wagering so much on having as your central character a comic grotesque so loathsome and self-pitying, with thoughts mostly so banal, and then leaving the reader trapped, unrelieved, in his company for nearly 300 pages.
The second unexpected pleasure of America's Sweethearts is Zeta-Jones' extremely persuasive turn as a loathsome, horrid, domineering, self-absorbed bitch.
Or to make him so self-mortified, so loathsome, so inadequate, so isolated, so self-obsessed, so boring and bored, so guilty that no one could possibly love or desire him".
Guiltily she hid the tools of her loathsome trade; filled with self-hatred, she left her bed, on those sparse but nonetheless harrowing occasions when there was someone sharing it, to scrub from her the unnatural stench of the night's activities".
In 1968, at the height of America's self-examination (diagnosis: loathsome), he danced around the ring waving a little American flag to celebrate his gold medal at the Olympics, infuriating the black political establishment at home, which had just applauded the "Black Power" salute at the medal ceremony a few days before.
