Word: authorly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...announced panelists, Abigail Thernstrom, co-author of America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible and Nicholas Lemann '76, author of The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy...
...notions of the direction in which public life should move are highly derivative--although his chapter on the pervasive effects of irony and its corrosion of popular culture is original, very sophisticated, and compelling. But if you can cut through the occasional tediousness, what is left is the author as powerful exemplar of embodied faith and conviction, his emotion rousing correlative emotion in the reader. There is remarkable moral force behind Jedediah Purdy's introspection; a generation could do worse than to be moved by the example and the lucid expression of his passion...
This treatment of history, of course, requires a careful reader willing to recognize the author's point of view and take his judgments with a grain of salt. But this approach is still more useful than statements of fact, and less boring. Through personal stories, Lemann is able to address the problems arising from American values without mounting direct and unfounded attacks on the beliefs themselves. He is, therefore, able to present a subtle and complex argument, recognizing both the merits and the problems with different social constructions without sounding indecisive...
...truism of the psychologizing age that a book tells us as much about its author as about its subject. And the authentic power of For Common Things resides not in the originality of Purdy's thesis but rather in the not-at-all-incidental portrait of Jedidiah Purdy. The book is filled with autobiographical detail, and with confessions that spring from a mind uninterested in artifice and concealment: it is the example of Purdy's love of common things, rather than his sometimes boring case studies in the downfall of public culture, that proves effective...
Students in "Writing About Food" may want to grill the professor: Willoughby is the author of The Thrill of the Grill and is co-author of License to Grill...