Word: algerism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Hailey is presenting a deeply reassuring view of what seem to be the bewildering and often destructive workings of American high finance. He writes in the tradition of Horatio Alger and Andrew Carnegie, saying that yes, American business can be explained in straight talk that anyone can understand and yes, it is glamorous and exciting up there at the top, and no, banks and big business are necessarily neither unresponsive and exploitative nor in the control of a closed hereditary elite. Arthur Hailey is, these days, the great American novelist because he tells us what we want to hear...
...fact, by most outward measure, Vidal's present life is close to the last chapter in an Alger novel-updated by Gore Vidal. He spends eight or nine months each year at La Rondinaia...
...vivant, dashing in tweeds, with wavy hair and eyes as soulful as a bandleader's. Kluger also provides a contrapuntal portrait of John W. Davis, who ran for the Democrats against Calvin Coolidge in 1924. A brilliant lawyer who served as counsel to Eugene Debs, Alger Hiss and Robert Oppenheimer, Davis was also what Kluger calls a "gentleman racist." At 80, wearing a cutaway, he appeared before the Supreme Court defending segregation by ingenious psychological and legal arguments...
Scholars know Simon Forman as the man who attended-and made notes on -four of Shakespeare's plays performed during the dramatist's lifetime. Historian A.L. Rowse, 72, knows Forman as something more: an extravagant conflation of Horatio Alger and Doctor Faustus whose claim to fame lies buried in a "vast mass" of barely decipherable manuscripts. Having burrowed through this trove of papers, Rowse now announces that Forman "has exposed himself as no one has done, not even Pepys or Boswell or Rousseau, and with more naive candor and ingenuous truthfulness than a Henry Miller...
...Irons only looks up those cases that interest him. One of Irons's main research projects right now is an investigation of the Alger Hiss case. Irons's interest grew out of his doctoral research, when he found some files in a library in the midwest that mentioned Hiss. Irons followed the discovery up with interviews, and research into the Hiss case is now a major part of his life. He says he is "almost--not quite" positive that Hiss was innocent of the charges of espionage and perjury for which he was convicted, and the law student filed...