Word: burnam
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There is, in the voices of Baby Boomers whose higher education was not rewarded with higher earnings, a certain bewilderment. "I certainly expected to live as well as my parents," says Audrey Burnam, 35, a research psychologist at UCLA who lives in a rented two-bedroom apartment while her father, who works at a copper smelter in Arizona and never graduated from high school, owns his own three-bedroom house. "I certainly expected to be able to afford a home. I am comforted," she sighs, "that this is happening to a whole generation...
...many working supermoms, a psychic guilt tax is deducted from the paycheck. After visiting the day-care-center manager who would look after her newborn child, UCLA's Burnam lamented, "I was really depressed to think that this woman would spend more time with my child than I would." After putting in the kinds of long hours required to succeed in almost any profession, working mothers return home wondering how they will muster enough energy to give their children more than just a good-night kiss. It helps that more men are willing to lend a hand with housework...
...truth seeker is Tom Burnam, an English professor at Portland State University in Oregon, and his compendium is the best antidote to nonsense since H.L. Mencken hung up his spites. "I believe," says Burnam in his introduction to The Dictionary of Misinformation, "that when we fall it's not because our reasoning faculties have tripped us; it's because of the things we know that just aren...
...that we may never trip again, Burnam reminds us that...
...Burnam is more utilitarian than American Credo and is barely winged by Benchley, it is because his compendium contains more truth and less malice than its predecessors. The Dictionary of Misinformation misleads only once -in its title. Information is all that the volume contains: enough to keep the canny reader collecting bar bets for the rest of the year. Stefan Kanfer