Word: algebraical
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...writer reports bleakly of his schooling in Niles, Mich.: "Well I don't know how it is now, but in those times practally all the teachers in high school was members of the fair sex. Some of them was charter members." That throwaway second sentence, evoking algebra-spouting harpies of deadly rectitude, would be recognizable as pure Lardner if it were found unsigned in a fortune cookie...
Thesis anxiety or not, if Eric Ambler's fifteen or so books were not so wildly interesting I could have kicked the habit. Agatha Christie, who has all the psychological insight of second year algebra, couldn't have maintained interest like that, and if you've ever tried Rex Stout you'd know after three of four books that Nero Wolfe is really just a fat old fart. Almost every collection of one-author-one-genre books gets repetitive after a while: critics betray this by calling thrillers a "craft" or a pulp writer a "masterful technician," generally revealing that...
...Riley agrees with the rest of the Society on one of its most coherent themes--hero worship of Robert Welch. Riley told me that "Mr. Welch was reading Greek and Latin at age 6, knew algebra by 8, went to college at 12." Andrew Lane, a full-time employee who answers Society members' complaints and questions, called Welch "a brilliant man, an historian of the first rank. He read Ridpath's History of the world--that's nine volumes you know--by age 7." My tour guide, Frank Gotch, who had just come from Texas to work with Lane, made...
...hating whites and not being too smart." This definition of blackness, say the authors, can lead to "absolute terror" and conflict in those black teens "who would like to have friendships with blacks or whites, who enjoy Beethoven as much as Isaac Hayes' Hot Buttered Soul, who prefer algebra to basketball...
...deplores "the kind of '60s liberalism that involves pushing money after every problem." In education, he is against permissive systems that "teach kids algebra hi the third grade and remedial reading in the twelfth grade." On law and order: "Let's get back to the old-fashioned idea that an individual is responsible for his actions." On drugs: "If people want to get high, they should turn to meditation...