Word: americans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Golden Ghetto. Opposed to the no-goodniks are the do-gooders, who, according to the Lederer-Burdick ideal, live at the native level, stay outside the Americans' "ingrown social life," also known as S.I.G.G. (Social Incest in the Golden Ghetto), never shop at the PX, work with their hands, and do winsome things like playing the harmonica. Among the best of these is "the ugly American" of the title, a big, homely engineering genius full of bright, simple, technical ideas that the overambitious Asians want no part of. Like most of the "good" Americans in the book...
...Brooms. For all its blatant oversimplification, The Ugly American (a title that seeks to go beyond and below Graham Greene's The Quiet American) has the great merit of drawing the reader into a vital subject rarely treated by fiction. And this Book of the Month Club selection does illustrate the fact that no nation in history has ever faced the problems the U.S. encounters. Like proconsuls of General Napier's type, U.S. officials are held responsible for the welfare of millions, are expected to attend to their wants and hopes, from plumbing to higher education. But, unlike...
...there is, after all, the wife of the "ugly American," a lady readers will enjoy meeting. Looking over the situation in Sarkhan, she decides that the people's backs are bent because they use short brooms. Hustling into action, she discovers a 5-ft. reed instead of a 2-ft. reed to be used for broom handles, a technological revolution for which the villagers reward her with a small shrine bearing the inscription. "In memory of the woman who unbent the backs of our people...
Theodore Dreiser, that shaggy old lion of American letters, sat in a library reference room reading St. Thomas Aquinas. Next to Dreiser sat Miss Fannie Hurst, author. They started to talk, and so fascinated was Dreiser by her remarks on Aquinas that he insisted on continuing the conversation even though she had to catch a plane to St. Louis. Dreiser, as Author Hurst now tells it, flew right along with her, but not before asking her husband if he had any objections. He did not. which leads Author Hurst to remark: "This throws a revealing light on my wonderful kind...
...finally start climbing the Matterhorn in the Sierra Nevada. This climb, which occupies about a fourth of The Dharma Bums, is a writer's set piece, a hymn to nature. Kerouac's poetic imagery of towering snowscapes, frosty-breathed dawns, star-drugged nights suggests that the great American romance is still the Great Outdoors. At trip's end Japhy prepares to leave for a Japanese Buddhist monastery, while Ray is possessed by a Whitmanesque vision of "a great rucksack revolution," with "millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray . . . making young...