Word: books
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...article follows the lines of his latest book, "Twilight of Mankind," which sets forth his thesis that man is declining. While writing for the Associated Press, Professor Hooton made the statement, "The masters of our destiny are too wise to conduct a war on the lines I have laid down...
Dennett advised that if a student really wishes to help beggars, he should either buy a book of meal tickets at some restaurant, or take the man's name and consult the files of some relief agency...
...difficult to define precisely the unique excellence of this book. It is primarily a collection of brief essays about the plays and poems, essays which never exceed fifteen pages in length. Mr. Van Doren deliberately excludes considerations of Shakespeare biography, Elizabethan drama and the like; the center of his preoccupation is always the peculiar interest of each play...
This is a book without "theories" about the plays, and I enclose the word in inverted commas because the book is in fact crowded with theories which are carefully to be distinguished from the stuff of doctoral theses. Mr. Van Doren's comment on Falstaff's style is a case in point: "(Falstaff) being old and fat, he is short of breath and so must be brief of phrase . . . He has made the most of this limitation. Artist that he is, he has accepted its challenge and employed it in effects that express his genius with a notable and economical...
...often in such mixtures as "One can't be sure of nothin'. . . ." He speaks of "oil wells burning through the moth-hung night" in Texas, when any Texan could tell him that what characteristically burns at night in Texas is gas, not oil. Through the whole book, despite its fluency and literary skill, runs a vitiating imprecision. Prokosch's words on America seem to apply as well or better to his own writing...