Word: books
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...course of his slim book--For Common Things runs to 207 pages--Purdy spends altogether too much time on what he openly admits are his pet issues: the miasma of confusion that is eastern European public life after 1989, and the ecological disaster of strip-mining in West Virginia. And Purdy admits, too, that his notions of the direction in which public life should move are highly derivative--although his chapter on the pervasive effects of irony and its corrosion of popular culture is original, very sophisticated, and compelling. But if you can cut through the occasional tediousness, what...
...Test is an adept criticism of America's current educational philosophy--a cultural obsession with "making it," symbolized by the intensely scrutinized SAT. But the SAT is only a portion of "the big test" of Lemann's title. In his book, Lemann argues convincingly that the academic elitism of the American meritocracy, structured by its system of higher education, never lived up to its morally defensible Jeffersonian ideal of educating an intellectual few who would serve and advance the national community. Rather, the current system of selection for higher education based on the related criteria of academic performance, scholastic aptitude...
Roger D. Hodge is not afraid of this kind of behavior. His Harper's Magazine review of Jedediah Purdy '97's first book, For Common Things, is one of the most vitriolic and least clever put-downs I have ever read; when its negativity is contrasted with Purdy's obvious and infectuous enthusiasm for the many things he loves and praises, the review also begins to seem strikingly sad. In his preface, Purdy boyishly admits that his book is "one young man's letter of love": it is this vulnerability that makes Purdy a moving and an effective narrator. That...
...truism of the psychologizing age that a book tells us as much about its author as about its subject. And the authentic power of For Common Things resides not in the originality of Purdy's thesis but rather in the not-at-all-incidental portrait of Jedidiah Purdy. The book is filled with autobiographical detail, and with confessions that spring from a mind uninterested in artifice and concealment: it is the example of Purdy's love of common things, rather than his sometimes boring case studies in the downfall of public culture, that proves effective...
...value of living on a hillside farm in West Virginia, we lack a politics that functions as a repository of our hopes and dreams." Even to a reader less self-consciously worldly and less corrosively bitter than Hodge, Purdy's tone and substance--the fact that this book is about Jedediah Purdy, and that any power in the book springs from his unshakeable convictions--may seem narcissistic; and his tendency towards moralistic aphorisms, towards a Thoreauvian epigrammatic style, seems a little bit pompous...