Word: book-of-the-month
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...Book-of-the-Month Club advertises meritorious and meretricious books in the same loud tone of voice. To the club's 900,000 members, judgments like "powerful," "moving," "noble," "haunting" must by now have the same dull ring as "colossal" has for moviegoers. When the Mountain Fell, the club's co-choice for October, is promoted with all these words. But for the first time in many a month, they are not entirely irrelevant...
Thomas Duncan, a down & out ex-Harvard man, has written a rags-to-riches story, and as a result is about to enjoy a rags-to-riches life himself. His novel is the Book-of-the-Month Club selection for September (touted by Book Selector John P. Marquand as "head & shoulders . . . above any fiction [we] have examined this year"). It has already been peddled to Hollywood...
...veteran editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, biographer of Thoreau and Whitman, and one of the original judges for the Book-of-the-Month Club, Henry Seidel Canby has been a proficient and even an eminent middleman of letters. His reflections about U.S. life & literati are noteworthy. This book includes two revised but previously published works-one on the '905, The Age of Confidence (1934), one on Yale (1936) and a newly composed section on U.S. literature. The author refers to himself as sensitive. He is certainly observant and shrewd...
Canby writes with complacency of having "stuck his neck out" in a favorable review of one of Sherwood Anderson's early books. He also held out alone on the Book-of-the-Month Club jury for Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. But such bravado was obviously rare. For Canby is not a daring or a penetrating critic. On the other hand, by his industry, fluency, and sincere impulse to "pass on sound values to the reading public," he made a place for himself in his period. He is as competent as any prophet to observe...
...jugged for protesting. When Fleming, disgusted with the local scene, opened up on the Crackers, even his friends told him he was crazy to stick his neck out. He wrote, he spoke, he agitated, he became a zealot. In 1943 he published Colonel Effingham's Raid, a Book-of-the-Month novel whose harsh kidding of the Cracker Party and its dirty devices was lost on that organization's nonreading leaders. Last year Fleming's sowing reaped a triumphant harvest: the voters of Augusta kicked out the Cracker Party, and voted in a city-manager plan...