Word: books
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Still, fielding darts from captious intellectuals was not quite the equivalent of facing bullets or a mugger's knife. Why then, ponders Podhoretz, did so many liberals let themselves be intimidated? He devotes much of his book to searching for an explanation and concludes that intellectuals suffered a failure of nerve. When confronted, they would not fight for their beliefs, especially if the opposition came from the left, which was supposed to be on the side of justice and humanity. They would not defend the integrity of thought against crude up-against-the-wall sloganeering...
...allies have been dubbed "neo-conservatives," a label that causes them some discomfort. Podhoretz continues to claim to be a liberal; it is the radicals, he insists, who became illiberal. Such quib bling may be of greater interest to the author than to his readers. But if his book is often tedious in detail, it has a sweeping theme. At a time of testing, the Commentary group upheld standards of civilized discourse and thereby earned an honorable place in the history of American letters. They behaved as intellectuals are supposed...
...could be that the googol's emergence marked the time when mankind's fascination with indigestible numbers slipped beyond the pale. In the same decade that the googol appeared, Sir Arthur Eddington opened his absolutely serious book, The Philosophy of Physical Science, with the sentence: "I believe there are 15,747,724,136,275,002,577,605,653,961,181,555,468,044,717,914,527,116,709,366,231,425,076,185,631,031,296 pro tons in the universe and the same number of electrons...
Plainly, a world that feeds on such impenetrable figures suffers a peculiar compulsion that might be called googolmania The hunger is, whatever else, a marvel to behold, providing the spectacle of a species unable to solve a 13% inflation rate, yet eager to be informed by the Guinness Book of World Records that the world weighs 6,585,600,000,000,000,000,000 tons...
President Increase Mather later held a ceremonial book burning in the Yard, expunging a book that discussed Cotton Mather's role in the witchcraft trials...