Word: chapter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...departments. About 50 scientists, including almost the whole faculty of Engineering and Applied Sciences Department, owe their livelihood to his very large endowment. McMahon, one of the flock, pays tribute with his novel--"90 per cent of the book is lies about Gordon McKay," he says, though the last chapter, in which McKay returns to Cambridge, makes a fortune in shoe manufacturing, and befriends several Harvard faculty members, is "mostly true...
Handlin calls Gore Vidal's Burr and 1876 "inventions that disguised the poisonous portrayal of the early Republic in a fantastic tale of corruption, greed and sex." In a chapter entitled "The Diet of a Ravenous Public," Handlin rips the 'factional' historians to shreds. He assails Ragtime, calling "racial prejudice the crutch on which the book limps along," and renders equal treatment to critics that lapped...
Also entertaining are two short portraits, one of Albert Einstein, the other of Robert Goddard. Broca's Brain was published to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Einstein's birth, and the chapter Sagan devotes to him is reflective of the event, brimming with amusing anecdotes and quotes. The portrait of Goddard glows with Sagan's adulation of the great eccentric and pioneer. If there's any problem with these two portraits, in fact, it's that they're almost oo good--you wish you were reading a book by one of the two, instead of just a chapter about...
...line with this, Sagan's watchword is a citation from Bertrand Russell: "William James used to preach the will to doubt." This is, of course, a sound scientific viewpoint. What's awry in Broca's Brain is that Segan doesn't practice this, save for one chapter. His essay on Emmanuel Velikovsky takes a once popular but porous theory explaining a series of converging mythological catastrophes and subjects it to an exacting analysis. This piece, three times as long as any other, is the most interesting, the most developed, and certainly the most scientifically responsible in the book...
These lists form the substance of the manual--dull as any address book, they are Edelhart's forte. He glues them together with chapter headings that resemble K-Mart stick-ems: "Well, If They Can Cure Hiccups, What About Acne?" or "A Knotty Problem--Tying Ties...