Word: barzun
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Nothing is too big or too small for Bennett to put his hand to. He scribbles away at the obligatory manifestoes, digs in on fund raising, entertains the big-name circuit riders, like David Riesman, Jacques Barzun and Mortimer Adler, who drop by, and sends the fellows out on their own hustings, mostly to lecture at the three universities in the neighborhood: Duke, North Carolina and North Carolina State. Then he taps out a memo: "Lost. Alice has asked us all to check whether her thin black-handled Henckels knife went home by mistake on a cake platter...
...Adler is planning an equally weighty continuation of that shelf: a 20-volume series entitled, not surprisingly, "Great Books of the 20th Century." Writing to the series' editorial board-including such luminaries as Norman Cousins and Jacques Barzun-Adler asked which modern authors might be worthy of the company of Homer, Galileo and Marx. He added: "I am willing to stick my neck out by nominating the authors and works from which a selection should be made...
...recapture the elusive qualities of a great teacher. Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz, once awed by "the witchlike precision" of Trilling's mind, said that he was "an intellectual father." Added Beat Generation Poet Allen Ginsberg: "He had a sweet heart, a sad, solemn sweetness." Columbia Professor Emeritus Jacques Barzun, who collaborated with Trilling for 36 years in a course on cultural history, admired the way "his thoughts progressed in a rational manner from beginning to end." A student who took that Barzun-Trilling course remembers most vividly the moment when some unfortunate victim cited the motto of the Order...
...historians are likely to take Barzun's objections seriously, except perhaps as a warning that they should be careful no matter what sort of data they employ. Luckily, not all older historians are so full of methodological reaction. Oscar Handlin, not the most liberal man at Harvard, is the mentor of both Sennett and Thernstrom, and he managed to pass on to the younger historians the critical historical sense that served him so well in less quantitative works. The two cultures of humanism and science have probably come closer to merging in history than in any other field...
...conceptual biases of neo-classical economics, which are even more out of touch with the early nineteenth century than they are with the modern world. In the same way, many earlier historians of slavery were influenced by racism. These are the real problems. The muse Clio, to whom Barzun appeals, should be more tolerant of methods than either Barzun or Fogel, but far more attentive to preconceptions--aware still that history never embraces more than a small part of reality, and coupling whatever means of reason with whatever means of observation, to allow a fuller embrace...