Word: fad
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...that can be tailored to sell. Says one publishing executive: "We decide first of all, is there a market for this book, then second, whom could we get to do such a book and do it well." Many of these market-tested, selfhelp, how-to-do-it, picture, memoir, fad and stunt books are written by clergymen, dietitians, gardeners, gourmets, radio comedians, diplomats, psychoanalysts, and almost anyone but writers. The amateurs, of course, are provided with outlines, editors and, in many cases, ghosts (a ghost may earn from $1,000 to $5,000 a book, in addition to a whack...
...great and gloomy Dane, Soren Kierkegaard, has turned up in many strange guises. The philosophy of the once-obscure 19th century theologian has been abused to label everything from "existentialist" hairdos to literature, and his troubled probings of Man, God and Infinity have inspired a modern philosophical fad as well as the "crisis theology" of contemporary Protestantism. Last week Kierkegaard appeared in music. His musical interpreter: U.S. Composer Samuel Barber, 44, who studied Kierkegaard for a decade, and made him the subject of his first major composition in four years...
...story's golden opportunities are polished bright-some of the fad stuff could hardly be funnier-but too many are dipped in common brass. The tunes, all but one called Imagine, are routine musicomedy, and the lyrics are of the sort that rhyme "baritone" with "aware o'tone." Even so, as crackpots go, Louis Calhern is a Ming vase, and Evelyn Varden provides at least one fine moment. At the Mr. Universe contest, while Steve Reeves is straining to lift the crucial bar bell, she glares at Purdom and hisses: "Don't just sit there! Hold...
...sterilization of the insane. It has now become much commoner. There has been no detectable increase in New England or the Southeast, but some big cities of the middle Atlantic seaboard report a moderate increase. In some smaller Midwestern cities and the border states, vasectomy has become a fad, with doctors themselves setting the trend and joking about having been "clipped." In one prairie city of 250,000, two urologists who share an office do an annual average of 50 vasectomies apiece. Around Los Angeles the increase has been marked but moderate...
Apparently inaugurated in Colorado, this newest chain letter fad spread to Yale. It came to Harvard when a Yale sophomore, anxious to make a quick sale, sold it through the mails to an undergraduate here...