Word: bernstein
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...fails to mention the Norton lectures. And the Harvard archives doesn't contain a great deal of material on the subject either. It was as collection of the manuscripts and most of the posters announcing the dates and times of the various lectures and an admission ticket from the Bernstein lecture. But aside from a few newspaper clippings, and about 20 copes of the same program from the first lecture given by Aaron Copland in 1952, there's nothing...
THURBER by BURTON BERNSTEIN 532 pages. Dodd, Mead...
...lucky. A couple of years ago, an academician named Charles Holmes produced a solemn literary biography called The Clocks of Columbus, in which he discerned, for instance, three levels of language in the 2,500 words of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Now comes New Yorker Writer Burton Bernstein with a drink-by-drink analysis, or bibulography, of the humorist's sometimes agonizing life...
Holmes' book was merely plonking and dull, and thus ludicrously inappropriate; Bernstein's is plonking and offensive. What offends is not the old news that Thurber had sexual problems, drank a lot and toward the end was often outrageously abusive at parties. That description fits half the writers listed in Books in Print. No adult should expect a humorist, or anyone else for that matter, to have a funny life...
...which was his subject matter, has been smeared with tedium. It is little service to Thurber or the reader to print windy, dozen-page letters of no high literary quality when a few quoted phrases and a sentence of summary would have conveyed the nature of most of them. Bernstein prints them, almost without excision. Bernstein, moreover, is the kind of writer who tries for breeziness by referring, for instance, to New York City as "Gotham," to England as "Albion" and to Hollywood as "the fabled Tinseltown." He sees nothing wrong, either, with writing "his scrupulously guarded virginity, hidden...