Word: polymath
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...slow day sportswriters could depend on the polymath Berg to fill a column. "More profiles of Berg were published than any other journeyman ballplayer in history," writes Dawidoff. But he will be best remembered as the spy who took rain checks. An OSS operative during World War II, Berg traveled widely, lived well and managed to be where trouble wasn't. In 1944 he was at a conference in peaceful Switzerland to hear a lecture by Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel prizewinning physicist who headed Hitler's atom-bomb project. Berg's orders were to shoot the scientist if it became...
...lasted a little longer in a life that was lived harder and faster than most (mood: appassionato; tempo: allegro con brio), Leonard Bernstein would have turned 75 this week. But the polymath pianist, conductor, composer, television personality, Harvard man, Broadway baby and quintessential New Yorker died in 1990, leaving a hole in the fabric of American musical life that many have found irreparable. In the three years since Bernstein's death, sales of his records have doubled, his compositions have started to win greater respect, and his legend has waxed. It's almost as if the great man had never...
...goal was to learn enough about these scientific and transnational factors to try to divine the quality of life in different regions of the planet through the middle of the next century. In an era when knowledge is narrowly compartmentalized, Kennedy warrants praise for the breadth of these polymath ambitions, aided though he was by five research assistants. But ultimately what mars Kennedy's book is that his grasp never fully equals his global reach...
...Vile Body is largely the creation of Teachout, a Missouri-born polymath who plays jazz piano, reviews records and ballet, and is gearing up to write a biography of H.L. Mencken. When he moved to New York from the Midwest three years ago, Teachout was dismayed to discover that the city was, as he puts it, "hostile to civilized friendship." There was little opportunity for people of his age and ideology to coalesce for intellectual sustenance. "Conservatives and libertarians exist in an adversary culture," he explains. "You need a community where you don't have to be arguing first causes...
...conviction that specialization is the besetting sin of our time. The program aims, he says, at "enabling the young to become better human beings and better citizens, not just better at some particular line of work." The goal is bold, perhaps Utopian and typical of this tireless polymath. Adler, 79, is an encyclopedist and organizer of knowledge whose Great Books (with Hutchins) and Great Ideas volumes set out simply, and comprehensively, to make the intellectual monuments of Western civilization available to any reader...