Word: agaric
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...newspaper critics as sensational. It is nothing of the sort; and that it has been burdened with superlatives would seem to indicate that publishers have lost none of their old finesse and critics none of their superficiality. The reader, one gathers, is suposed to be startled when Mr. Herbert Agar says, for example, that Washington's sole "job" in 1776 "was to keep an army of some sort in the field, and wait for the English to lose the war;" he is supposed to gasp when he hears that in 1814 "Madison's government... was delighted...
...would be unfair to judge Mr. Agar's work on any such basis as this. For although he assumes the unfortunate manner, in such cases, of one imparting state secrets, his original intent encompassed far more than a superficial reduction of Messrs. Samuel Eliot Morison and James Truslow Adams. "The People's Choice" was inspired by the logical connection between the problems which confront Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the coronation of Democracy with its owners in 1829. His thesis, conveyed through the apt medium of presidential biography, is briefly this: since 1789, America has progressed through three cycles...
...Agar's analysis can gather few garlands in the name of novelty. It has been taught for years from every enlightened college lecture platform. "The People's Choice," however, may be counted important, for the very good reason that Mr. Agar has told his story simply and well, that he sums up a complicated analysis in terms that can be understood by the average citizen and in a year when such ideas should be common property...
...inclined to regret that Mr. Agar felt compelled to report with great detail on the early lives of his subjects and hence to compress his commentary into a meagre allotment of pages. But no reader can escape the fact that the author does keen justice to his characters. "Jemmy" Madison, for example, "the withered little apple-John," was "small, quiet, precise... In print he had authority and effectiveness; but he had neither of these qualities as chief executive of the nation;" William Howard Taft was a "genial, unambitious man who never got over the surprise at finding himself president;" Wilson...
...error of ridiculing the Articles of Confederation, that he fails to draw enough attention to the political sagacity of Jackson's bank veto, and that he assumes, without proof, that the rise of capitalism and its shelter, the fourteenth amendment, were carefully prearranged. But these are minor points. Mr. Agar set out to give John Citizen an understanding of his government's position today. He has succeeded admirably...