Word: chapter
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...knows, despite sweating palms and churning stomach, the superhero always wins. But lingering childhood confidence in the media creation cannot quite assert itself against Superfolks. Mayer is not Alfred Hitchcock or Agatha Christie, and when one turns a page anticipating a crucial revelation and finds instead a new, unrelated chapter, one can cringe and say "Aha. He's trying to build suspense--cheap trick." The simple reason Mayer used moth-eaten tactics is that he can use them successfully. Besides, everything else is parodied in this book. Bella Abzug drives a taxi, Bill Buckley is a Tombs prison guard...
...banality of his observations. For example, he traces the current class distinctions among blacks to the old divisions between house slaves and field slaves, then peremptorily concludes that the reason why blacks rarely succeed in business is that "they don't quite like each other." In a later chapter, he notes that blacks do make skilled surgeons, perhaps, he adds, "because they have especially deft and agile hands...
Birmingham's coup de grâce, however, is a chapter called "Taste." He takes up what he calls "the complicated question of black taste, or perhaps, lack of it," and finds that all is "not quite right." Why, puzzles Birmingham, should the aristocratic wife of Washington's black mayor "satisfy herself with plastic plants in her house and settle for brightly colored glass ceiling fixtures"? Why does a Harlem socialite place a huge Steuben glass bowl in the center of her coffee table and fill it with gold-painted walnuts? Why, he asks, do so many blacks...
...valuable lands as a part of the national heritage. Says he: "Never before in our history have we been able to set aside areas of this magnitude." Other conservationists, including spokesmen for the 16-organization Alaska Coalition, endorse his views. "This is it," says Jack Hession of the Alaska chapter of the Sierra Club. "This is the nation's last chance to set aside meaningfully large areas of Arctic and subarctic lands. It doesn't make sense to sacrifice the lands now for short-term economic gains...
...class. Last week Columbia tried to make things right, if not logical, with the author of How to Read a Book by awarding him its Graduate Faculties Alumni Award for Excellence. Adler accepted benignly, noting later that his difficulties with the college had provided him with a chapter title for his autobiography: "Dropout." He also revealed that he finally learned to swim-when someone told him that it was as easy as humming...