Word: conceited
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Third, it insults the "slaves" themselves to refer to them as such. Grossman unconsciously reflects the bourgeois liberal conceit that any standard of living which does not match the American middle class is worthless--the equivalent of slavery. This conceit is often expressed in terms of genuine sympathy and a desire for greater equality (though not at one's own expense), yet it inevitably carries an undertone of contempt: sympathy for the poor Mexican grounded in the judgment that his life is not worth living...
...complications of The Counterlife ripple out from a central conceit. A man with a heart condition finds that the medication he must take renders him impotent. Hence Henry Zuckerman, 39, faces the bleak prospect of life without any more after-work office trysts with his alluring assistant. Similarly, Henry's famous older brother Nathan, 45, cannot marry an Englishwoman named Maria and create both the child and the settled life that, after three failed marriages, he now desperately wants. The only solution in both cases is bypass surgery. The Zuckerman brothers face the same difficult choice, but for diametrically opposed...
...American dishes served at her small and sophisticated restaurant are at once surprising yet comfortably familiar in taste. Now she and the artist Paul Davis, who painted the impressionistic seasonal mural that wraps around the walls of the restaurant, have put together a tiny, precise and endearing conceit: The Arcadia Seasonal Mural and Cookbook (Abrams; $14.95). This may be the gift cookbook of the year -- 28 pages opening out in a gatefold reproduction of the glowing Davis mural. Under the panels for each season are a few of Rosenzweig's most popular dishes for that time of year. Among...
...author once worked as an editor at Viking Press, and she writes of the industry with affectionate exasperation. There is a wonderful Mad Hatter editorial meeting, propelled by reasoning of the most tangential sort. There are the elusive editors who dread authors as "walking vessels of petty grievance and conceit." An especially funny cameo is Allan Schieffman, the macho editor who boasts to Frances that "Norman Mailer had punched him in the stomach, an affectionate punch, and a tribute to his washboard midriff . . . Saul Bellow had bipped him on the arm to test his biceps. William Styron, who was balding...
...situation is neither recent nor the product of Cambridge conceit. It is part of a legacy from President Charles Eliot, who, starting in 1869, remade Harvard with a new emphasis on research and graduate study, and, among his faculty, strongly encouraged these scholarly pursuits. At Harvard, as at other institutions, the compass needles of many ambitious academics swung toward research. One result is that complaints about poor undergraduate teaching, lofty and inaccessible scholars, huge impersonal survey courses and cold university bureaucracies are heard on campuses from Maine to California. Like Harvard, most institutions of higher learning are wrestling with...