Word: book
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Like the Cover of an old Book...
Razor's Edge. By far the best story in the book is George P. Elliott's satire, Among the Dangs. The Bangs are a homicidal South American tribe and the reluctant adventurer conned into going among them is a penniless college student who has taken an anthropology course, and who further qualifies, as he notes, by being "a good mimic, a long-distance runner, and black." His university persuades him to go, and when he returns, crawling with data and skin disease, he is rewarded with a lowly academic post...
Subtitled "A Vermont Doctor's Guide to Good Health," the book has astonished booksellers by creeping to the upper level of bestseller lists and staying there for months-despite the fact that, when it appeared in 1958, it attracted no more critical attention than its nonsensical content of pseudo medicine and pseudo science deserved. Probably least surprised by Folk Medicine's success was 64-year-old Texas Wheeler-Dealer Clint Murchison (TIME cover, May 24, 1954), a disciple of Dr. Jarvis' Honegar cult, who persuaded him to write the book and persuaded Holt to publish...
Joyce the Baboon. It is ironic that, for the most part, Miller remembers to be an artist instead of an orator only in the wacky, obscene, and sometimes brilliantly comic passages that make most of his books unmailable-but that will not be found here. Reading Miller in his scurrilous top form is like ending a riotously drunken evening by getting a foot caught in a chamber pot; but such sport cannot be had in this book...
...industry of man which has accumulated about him like an iron ring of dead learning." In a collection of aphorisms, the reader learns that "in life's ledger, there is no such thing as frozen assets." If the sage of Big Sur were to be judged from this book alone, it would be hard to justify Editor Durrell's prophecy that Miller may one day be classed with Whitman and Blake...