Word: authority
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that during a summer when the Lampoon ground out its second Time parody, recorded its Surprising Sheep album, and ran at least one candidate for the mayoralty of New York, these latter-day Barnums could also have published a 160-page paperback. First editions do claim to have been authored by "Henry N. Beard and Douglas C. Kenney," who enthusiastically confess in a chatty little Forward how they overcame being 'handicapped by near-fatal hangovers and the loss of all our bodily hair (but that's another story).' Another story, indeed! For between this brace of leering parentheses, the whole...
...strange but very nearly incomprehensible to a mind formed in the 20th century. A modern student can read the documents-the witch-burners were articulate enough-but statistics and dry records are unlikely to convey to him any idea of the atmosphere that hangs for days, according to the author, in a town square after a witch has been burned. Is the smell, for instance, reassuring, since it signifies that evil has been expunged? Or is it unsettling, because it calls to mind a dreadful spectacle too heartily enjoyed? Such questions elude the historian...
...historical research, the reading of the documents, was only a beginning; the more important part of her learning, it is clear, came as her characters took form and motion. What clay and what fire make a witch? Write a novel, watch, and find out. The method works if the author has a genius for empathy and historic imagination...
...granddaughter filled with loathing for the lead-souled villagers who come to her for love charms and poisons. The book's flat prose is curiously eloquent. "She was on the side of the executioners," the account says of a young girl, "as children always are." The author knows what the town square of Liège smelted like; she can read the minds of judges three centuries dead. Witchcraft lives, and so does the novel...
...Fanny Hill. The decision stated that a book offending community standards could be proscribed only if it was found to be "utterly without redeeming social value." Had Wallace let this fact into his fabrication, the case of The Seven Minutes would have lost nearly all the artificial relevance the author so strenuously pumped into it. Instead he is content to conclude with incontestable banalities -among them the assertion that books are vital to civilization and honest men can have disagreements about them...