Word: authors
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Manhattan Folklorist Gershon Legman, author of a historical treatise on comic books, showed the psychiatrists some grisly samples and presented some shuddery statistics. Every year 500,000,000 comic books are printed; the average city child reads ten to a dozen a month. If there is only one scene of violence a page, this gives him a diet of "300 scenes of beating, shooting, strangling, torture and blood per month." Every city child who was six years old in 1938 has by now, Legman figured, "absorbed an absolute minimum of 18,000 pictorial beatings, shootings, stranglings, blood puddles and torturings...
...names, bull sessions, charity drives, the State Department, foreigners, middle-aged women, vitamins, public opinion polls, antiSemitism, poker games, investment capital, psychoanalysis, the Senate and the Statue of Liberty. Much of the book is funny, some of it is brilliant; all of it would be improved if the author had left out the high-toned language and one-way-glass point of view of anthropology...
Loneliness Is Suspect. Author Gorer's central theme is that Americans are haunted by a dread of loneliness and isolation: "The absence of doors in all but the most private parts of most houses, the wedged-open doors of offices and studies, the shared bedrooms in colleges and boarding houses, the innumerable clubs and fraternal and patriotic associations, professional organizations, and conventions, the club cars on trains, the numberless opportunities and facilities given for casual conversation, the radio piped into every hotel bedroom, into many railway cars and automobiles, left on incessantly in the house.... Americans, psychiatrists as well...
...this fear is to anticipate it, by rejecting before one is rejected." The other side of the fear of being rejected is "the fear of being exploited, of being made a sucker of, of not being truly loved for oneself alone but only for what one provides." This, says Author Gorer, is the meanest and one of the most prevalent of American fears. The generosity of Americans, great and ungrudging as it is, is likewise limited by the suspicion that they may be exploited...
...Author Gorer's chapters range through opinions on children ("the concept of being a sissy is a key concept for the understanding of American character"); jobs ("the typical patterns of the relationship between American employers and employees can be viewed as stemming from a shared abhorrence of the idea of one man being in overt authority over an equal"); plumbing ("the symbolic and patriotic value of these adjuncts to sanitary and comfortable living has become so great that Americans in foreign countries tend to esteem these alien societies in direct proportion to the number and availability of these amenities...