Word: compendium
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...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...
...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
...show is not, and could not pretend to be, a history or compendium of drawing. As a collector, Thaw admits his bigotries, and one of them is antipathy to Italian baroque. But in his favorite areas, particularly the 19th century, an exquisitely sure taste has been at work. One would have to go some distance before finding drawings as good as Cézanne's big study of a card player, in which the pencil strokes endow every plane of flesh and fold of cloth with the crystalline solidity of gray limestone; or Daumier's brace of lawyers...
David Smith, a 23-year-old student in the California state system, doesn't continue in a novelistic way: the rest of his book is a small compendium of useful statistics, theories and occasionally tiresome abstract Marxism, most of it gleaned from the already bursting radical literature on education. And the book succeeds, despite its sacrifice of artistry for detached analysis, if only because Smith sets up the essential drama in his first chapters: the contrast between the former products of university education, the regents--Ivy Leaguers from a Scott Fitzgerald nightmare--and the present student proletariat, which must shape...
These treacherous defects are all on parade in Seascape. It is not a hateful play; it is bland and innocuous, a two-hour sleeping pill of aimless chatter. In Act I, Nancy (Deborah Kerr) and Charlie (Barry Nelson) discuss their lives, which seem to be a compendium of all the middle-aged plaints one has heard about in recent drama and fiction or, quite possibly, from the next-door neighbor. In Act II, the couple is joined by two English-speaking lizards complete with crocodile tails. The lizards, Leslie (Frank Langella) and Sarah (Maureen Anderson), have been almost ostentatiously monogamous...