Word: excerpt
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...magazine's title Genesis "sounded kind of religious," recalled Anthony Battiato, executive vice president of the David McKay publishing company. So McKay innocently accepted the monthly's bid to print an excerpt from a book, The Accountability of Power, by Senator Walter Mondale, the son of a Methodist minister. Genesis, alas, is a gamy skin mag, and Mondale's view on the presidency appeared in its May issue along with essays like "69 Far-Out Ways to Turn On a Woman" and the "Erotic Diary of a Nympho Cheerleader." Battiato conceded that "we goofed," but there...
...Atlantic Monthly, just out his week, contains a long excerpt from--hold on to your hats--Doris Kearns's book on Lyndon Johnson. As you may remember, it is Long Awaited and Controversial. It has Raised Eyebrows on the Cambridge-Washington Circuit, and in the High-Powered World of Publishing. And so forth. Leaving aside that long and tangled story, though, it remains that the Atlantic piece just isn't very good, as scholarship or journalism...
...have other gripes too. Throughout the excerpt, Kearns quotes at great length from her bedside conversations with Johnson. Was she taking notes? Seems unlikely. Did she remember them with total accuracy? Given their blatant Freudianism, I doubt it. She has him saying, for instance, "I still believed my mother the most beautiful, sexy, intelligent woman I'd ever met, and I was determined to recapture her wonderful love, but not at the price of my daddy's respect." It sounds like something out of a textbook on the Oedipus Complex...
...excerpt reads like a political memoir, with all the characteristic flaws of that genre: first-person approach, great emphasis on the writer's own role, slightly wooden style, exaggeration of the bits of history the writer happens to know about first-hand. And even if a little positive revisionism on Johnson-particularly about his role in civil rights--might be a good thing, knowing that his Vietnam policy stemmed from his relationship with his mother seems, in the end, only to trivialize what happened there...
...Mayor Speaks" a few days before its publication. The one-page article, billed as a hypothetical interview with the mayor in the table of contents of the Inquirer's "Today Magazine," portrayed Rizzo making derogatory comments about ethnic groups and homosexuals, and parodied his style of speech. The following excerpt with translation for those unattuned to Philadelphia's politics, shows how deep Ryan plunged...