Word: bookishness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Ivory Tower. In 1922 Herbert Matthews, a bookish youth with a new Phi Beta Kappa key (Columbia University), answered a blind want ad in the New York Times for a secretary. The advertiser turned out to be the Times itself. After three years in the business office, he switched to the news department. A reluctant journalist, who still has a tendency to be ponderous and pontifical, he spent much of the next ten years longing to get back to his books (Dante, medieval history). Even when he became second man in the Times's Paris bureau, he writes ruefully...
...Homma, who flew from Tokyo as a character witness for her husband, described him to reporters as a bookish poet, "kind and considerate to his wife, servants and children." He dabbled in Chinese poetry, liked "serious literature," was especially fond of Galsworthy and Shaw. His favorite English-language novel: Gone With the Wind. (Army Intelligence said that he read a chapter nightly on Bataan before retiring, asked Tokyo to rush him the movie "when the Japanese land in California...
...Committee, in the case of high schools, does not view a tightening in the curriculum as the shield against these dangers. It suggests, indeed, "even a greater diversity than exists at present in the still largely bookish curriculum, since nothing else will match the actual range of intelligence and background among students...
...general nature, though in Chapter Four of its Report it examines specific aspects. The secondary school, it concludes, must be concerned with the physical and mental health of its pupils. ". . . The educational process has somewhat failed of its purpose," says the Report, "if it has produced the merely bookish youth who lacks spirit and is all light without warmth...
Courtney Fred Rogers, 26, is a tall, bookish, satyr-faced church organist who lost his family, one by one. His old grandmother, 76, died suddenly. His mother, apparently a suicide, was found one morning with chloroform-soaked cotton over her face. Finally, one night three years ago, his father, in a drunken stupor, was burned to death when the Los Angeles house caught fire...