Word: gibbon
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...Fadiman's bibliography and introduction is helpful. Unfortunately, the sheer pomposity of any such program of cultural pushups is enough to send many readers scuttling to the pages of Agatha Christie. Perhaps Fadiman should have totted up an auxiliary list of 100 works that are MERELY GOOD (Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Pope's Essay on Man-) and another of volumes FRIVOLOUS BUT CHARMING (Petronius' Satyricon, Cummings' Collected Poems...
...daughter of a friend from his two-year career as an army surgeon-Anne Home, who bore him four children and wrote tidy verses to Franz Joseph Haydn's music. While John padded about his museum, Anne kept a salon graced by Johnson and Boswell, Lord Chesterfield and Gibbon. Some of Hunter's students came too: Edward Jenner, who administered the first successful vaccination; Philip Syng Physick, the "Father of American Surgery...
...cool in faith, cooler in comfort. Astrology was in vogue together with "archaism," an aping of the past for the sake of novelty. The death of Hellenism in the fall of the Roman Empire was not caused by a "triumph of religion and barbarism," says Toynbee, taking issue with Gibbon. As Toynbee sees it, Christianity did not put the torch to the classic world; it lit one for it in the sightless dark...
...closest neighbor is a rich and really quiet American. Joe Bellman, who looks like "Edward Gibbon, parboiled," has not opened a book in 20 years, simply lolls in the sea and sun, and only worries how his next meal is coming, culinarily speaking. When the doctored fruit reaches grapefruit-size, Gourmet Joe poaches a fig. "This is how things tasted to Adam," he tells his maid delightedly, "before Eve introduced him to ignobler pleasures and spoiled his palate for ever more...
...philosophy during the last month of study, with collateral lectures by Morton White envisaged. Perhaps more of the year's time might be spent studying the philosophy of history. Being critically aware of the various claims to truth in history is as important for the concentrator as is reading Gibbon or Tacitus...