Word: gardners
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...have had those same old problems which had no solution then and have no solution now. The chief virtue of The Wreckage of Agathon is that it avoids the obvious temptations of easy relevance in favor of a more complex view of the nature of good and evil. John Gardner attempts great things in his novel, but succeeds only in creating a small, funny metaphysical novel that doesn't quite suffice for the problems it raises...
...minded old mystic, constantly eating onions, farting, and peeking in windows to watch elderly couples making love. Agathon scorns the Spartan ideal and gleefully embodies its antithesis. The novel deals with how he got this way and how he views himself, the people he knows, the universe he inhabits. Gardner adroitly uses the device of alternating two manuscripts: Agathon's disjointed writings in jail, and those of his cellmate and disciple Demodokos (whom he insists on calling Peeker), a callow youth who manages to be devoted to Agathon despite being disgusted and enraged by his antics...
Jordan J. Baruch, a lecturer at the B-School, and Robert G. Gardner, coordinator of Light and Communications at the Carpenter Center, are other directors of BBI. F. Stanton Deland, a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, and Edward C. Bursk, editor and publishing director of the Harvard Business Review, are other stockholders...
Early in the Fall, the Corporation emphatically stated its desire for a man with "a primary academic commitment." Only four of the 69 men-H. Gardner Ackley, U.S. Ambassador to Italy, George P. Shultz, director of the Bureau of Management, David E. Bell, executive vice-president of the Ford Foundation and former head of the Agency for International Development, and Lewis Branscomb, director of the National Bureau of Standards-are not presently working in a university or university related projects. Although all four have strong ties to academia, some have already been dropped from the list and the others...
...depth of Gardner's observations, however, and the acuteness of his understanding demand something more from him. With material as potent as Fat City's, an author keeping his own sense of bitter outrage under wraps relinquishes his right to poetry. One keeps hoping that Gardner will let himself go, will hurl himself into his work as Agee did in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, will see himself in his characters' plight, and implicate his readers in a necessary moral rededication. This doesn't happen. But Gardner's first remains a fine and sensitive novel, and a courageous...