Word: essayed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Gould has selected uniformly amusing and informative illustrations for his theme. In the essay that gives the book its title, he describes a thumb-like appendage on a panda's paw that helps it strip the leaves from bamboo shoots, a panda's favorite meal. The depiction of the panda in its natural habitat typifies the light yet information-filled passages that make this book eminently readable for the non-scientist...
...SUBJECT MATTER of the book--which includes essays on relative brain size, Down's syndrome, and a mite that dies before it is born, in addition to discussions of cartoon characters--remains entertaining throughout in large part because of Gould's style. He allows us to share his feelings of excitement and wonder about the world of natural history. In "The Panda's Thumb" essay, for example, Gould tells us of his childhood adoration of pandas and how delighted he was "when the first fruits of our thaw with China went beyond ping pong to the shipment of two pandas...
Wolfe stood among its founding fathers. In fact, the 1973 anthology ("The New Journalism") he edited and for which he wrote an introduction served as a pivotal milestone: the New Journalism's first look back at itself. And look back Wolfe did, with an affectionate and thoughtful and funny essay on the form's roots and early days. His generation's attitude towards the novel was the foundation: "It's hard to explain what an American dream the idea of writing a novel was in the 1940s, the 1950s, and right into the 1960s. The Novel was no literary form...
...that Arthur even thought she might have been able to control a small chunk of the world; had she read Walden before her departure, she could have saved enormous amounts of time and money. For Thoreau's point, never stated outright but implied in both Walden and the essay on Civil Disobedience, is that control is undesirable; instead that happy co-existence of man and nature is both the only hope and the best hope of man. "That government is best which governs least," Thoreau said--and by extension on to the banks of the little lake that served...
...much for the intellectual content. The rest of the book is a cunning, amusing and not always pertinent decoupage of articles centering on Blount's South pole: an amusing essay on the habits of the possum; or the tale of a woman who gets stuck to a dry cleaner's revolving garment rack with Super Glue and spends her days plotting a damage suit with her attorney trotting along beside her as she goes round and round with the cleaning; or Blount's modest proposals for new mass media. One scheme would eliminate the more boring moments...