Word: compendium
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...occurs. For in the vastness of sleep, all countries are contiguous and all generations contemporary, their nightly symbols-animals, the sensation of flight, erotic pursuits-varying little from the pre-Christian epoch to the present. That disclosure makes this nightmarish, violent, absurd and frustrating book oddly reassuring: a flawed compendium, but an ideal companion for the bedside...
Gods do not make bricks, or build sun domes, or scramble for sassafras in the shrubbery of Central Park. But for people who do, or want to, the Whole Earth Catalog is an almost inexhaustible compendium. It is a sort of Sears, Roebuck-Consumer Report for the minorities of the cybernetic age-from activists who want to improve the environment to abdicants who simply want to write bad poetry in the woods...
With that, Richard Nixon starts a new book, Real Peace: A Strategy for the West, a 109-page compendium of the old warrior's world views. He is publishing the small volume privately to hurry it into the hands of the leaders and geopolitical scholars who have listened to him in decades past. Page proofs in black folders sent out in plain brown envelops reached the press a few days ago with a small note containing this poignant line: "If it wasn't so long, I guess you might call this my Farewell Address...
Beneath its richly layered surface, this valuable compendium points to far-reaching changes. One is a Federal Government that no longer feels it can subsidize all pursuits of material satisfaction. Another is an increasingly international economy that is poorly understood even as it pinches the grass roots. A disturbing conclusion, but nobody, least of all the authors, promised that The Book of America had to have a happy ending for everyone...
Brand, 44, is the innovative publisher and writer who devised The Whole Earth Catalog in 1968. That eccentric compendium of mail-order tools, books and philosophical musings sold 2.5 million copies in its several versions and encapsulated the antitechnological attitudes of the '60s counterculture. Now Brand believes he can capture the new computer culture between book covers, and Doubleday & Co. is betting a record sum that he is right. On the basis of a twelve-page outline, the New York City publishing house advanced Brand a whopping $1.3 million to produce an oversize paperback that will guide readers through...