Showing results by narrator "Harold N. Cropp" in All Categories

No one skewers the popular movements of American culture like Tom Wolfe. In 1975, he turned his satirical pen to the pretensions of the contemporary art world - a world of social climbing, elitist posturing, and ingeniously absurd self-justifying theorizing. From the fuliginous flatness of the 50s to the pop op minimal 60s, right on through the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t 70s, Tom Wolfe debunks the great American myth of modern art in an incandescent, hilarious, and devastating blast.

In "Radical Chic", Wolfe focuses primarily on one symbolic event: a gathering of the politically correct at Leonard Bernstein’s duplex apartment on Park Avenue to meet spokesmen of the Black Panther Party. He re-creates the incongruous scene - and its astonishing repercussions - with high fidelity. In the companion essay, Wolfe travels west to San Francisco to survey another meeting-ground between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment. "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" deals with the newly emerging art of confrontation, as practiced by San Francisco’s militant minorities.

In 1919, American headlines proclaimed the fix and cover-up of the World Series as "the most gigantic sporting swindle in the history of America." In this painstaking review, Eliot Asinof has reconstructed the entire scene-by-scene story of the scandal, in which eight Chicago White Sox players arranged with the nation’s leading gamblers to throw the series to Cincinnati. Asinof vividly describes the tense meetings, the hitches in the conniving, the actual plays in which the Series was thrown, the Grand Jury indictment, and the famous 1921 trial.

Fortified with common sense and Biblical wisdom, Trumbull's straightforward guide has established its place as a classic work in the field of child rearing. Written over 100 years ago, it is completely free of modernist influence. After all, Freud had not yet developed his theories of the subconscious; Pavlov and Skinner had not yet introduced to educators their animal-training techniques known as behaviorism; Dewey's Religious (i.e. Secular) Humanism had not overtaken the public schools; and Dr. Benjamin Spock had not published his dangerous book on child training.

With over half a million copies in print of his “living classic” How to Read a Book in print, intellectual, philosopher, and academic Mortimer J. Adler set out to write an accompanying volume on speaking and listening, offering the impressive depth of knowledge and accessible panache that distinguished his first book.

Desiree Le Mire ran into the cave, anxious to explore, tempted by the legends of Inca gold. Harry Lamar and his brother Paul had no choice but to follow. After all, they could not let the beautiful dancer enter the black depths alone. Others lived there, however, protecting the gold of their ancestors, others now misshapen after generations of living underground. That was why no one who entered the cave ever emerged into daylight. But no one who had entered was as beautiful as Desiree - or as determined as the Lamars.

A former English teacher at Seattle University, Lyons enhanced his love for poetry by studying the great classical poets in the original Greek and Latin. This anthology is not just for connoisseurs. It is for everyone who enjoys poetry.....