Word: bookishness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...shyness, young John did well at school, and at 15 was ready to enter the University of Vermont. There he fell in love with learning, borrowed $500 from an aunt and set off for the six-year-old Johns Hopkins University for more study. "Don't be so bookish," Hopkins President Daniel C. Gilman warned him; "get out and see more people." But John stuck close to his books; he had made up his mind to become a professional philosopher...
Pint-sized José Figueres once described himself as "a literary socialist farmer with a kind of Atlantic Monthly mind." Thrust into politics as President of Costa Rica's ruling junta, he has never been quite able to decide whether to chuck politics for the bookish quiet of his coffee finca (farm), or to stay on in San José to finish the uphill fight for his program of "neo-liberalism."* Last week Pepe Figueres made his choice...
Each student had had to appear before an admissions committee. The committee was tough on grinds and narrow specialists ("Germany has had enough of bookish but purposeless Herren Doktoren"). It also rejected one boy who hopefully emphasized that his grandmother had been an Aryan. But it did accept several Communists-"otherwise," explained a professor, "we could not truly call ourselves a free university...
...public-library system was a collection of dark buildings filled with shabby books and headed by inept political appointees. Reform groups demanded that something be done. The first trained librarian they picked died in office after only a few months. The second time they were luckier: they got a bookish, pipe-smoking Tennessean named John Hall Jacobs...
This nostalgia for life below the level of the brain explains why so sensitive, religious a man as Graham Greene is preoccupied almost exclusively with the physical and spiritual underworld. Born in 1904 (his father was headmaster of Berkhampstead School, Robert Louis Stevenson was a distant relation), bookish, retiring young Greene finished his education at Oxford's scholarly Balliol College. After that he ran through a succession of newspaper jobs, plugged away at his novels in his spare time. The Man Within, the first book he thought good enough to submit, so delighted the publishing house of Heinemann that...