Word: guntherized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...After reading your review of Max Gunther's The Weekenders [May 22], I feel compelled to tell Gunther that all is not lost! Why, our weekends are filled with meaningful things like hanging clothes, doing dishes, writing reports, mowing lawns, changing diapers, answering mail, hollering at children, pulling weeds, charcoaling hamburgers, dashing to church and watching TV (with snide comments, so people will know we're really too intelligent for TV). If Mr. Gunther knows of any place here in Ohio where some of that deplorable sin and dreary, hollow fun is going on, could he please...
...WEEKENDERS by Max Gunther. 237 pages. Lippincott...
Reason Why. Weekenders, it turns out, are people who work five days a week, with two days off for getting into sociologically fascinating trouble. That is, weekenders are almost everyone not in jail. Most weekenders, Author Gunther reports, embrace the Fun Mystique. The weekender's "selfesteem depends on his success in having, or at least demonstrating, fun. The weekender likes to be thought of as an extrovert who lives in a loud fast whirl of activities. Anything less is felt to be almost if not quite pathological . . . Dr. James A. Wylie of Boston University has studied family recreation...
Here Author Gunther, with borrowed research, shows mastery of an important technique of the searching-look book-the compounding of statistics from air and egg white. What counts as an "activity"? Brushing your teeth? Mowing the lawn with a toy gasoline tractor? If five members of one of Dr. Wylie's families watch Gunsmoke, does the researcher chalk up five activities? This is an important element in the art of making the world sound hollow when it is thumped. Another is the unvarying assumption that no one ever does anything because he likes it. If he goes skiing...
Since there is almost no human activity that cannot be accomplished, attempted, contemplated, or escaped from on a weekend, Gunther has a lot to cover. Or to look at it another way, he has endless opportunities to quote from other Hollow Worlders whose subjects are more specialized. His book is, in fact, an anthology of the maxims of Russell Lynes, David Riesman, Helen Gurley Brown, Vance Packard, Betty Friedan and William H. Whyte...