Word: gunther
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...John Gunther, the most successful living practitioner of his kind of journalism (a mixture of Burton Holmes, Drew Pearson, Walter Winchell and the World Almanac) is highly readable. His writing is brisk and breezy. It is also glib, superficial, exaggerated, full of impressions passing as insights and facts palmed off as truths. This is probably the best of his books, certainly the best since Inside Europe, which had some excellent eyewitness reporting of Austria in the turbulent days of Dollfuss...
...Blond, hefty (225 lbs.) John Gunther has developed a rapid-transit system for writing books. His field trips for Inside Asia (1939) took a mere eleven months, for Inside Latin America (1941) only five. Now he has explored the 48 states on a jaunt lasting slightly more than a year. He has written a lot of letters (including one to every governor), interviewed many, and pumped a lot of local newsmen, some of whom are very helpful in the Gunther System, and apt to be highly flattered by such attention from one of journalism's most renowned panjandrums...
...Gunther starts his zip-clip saga in California, the Golden State ("ripe, golden, yeasty"), swings a great northeasterly arc across the Middle West to the Atlantic, drops south into the Cotton Belt, winds up down Texas-New Mexico-Arizona way, scattering his judgments as he goes. Samples...
Detroit, packed with "Southern white hillbillies, [motor] company thugs, ex-Bundists, and Ku-Kluxers," is "the most explosive town in the Western Hemisphere." Gunther finds words of praise for Arizona's Governor Sidney P. Osborn, Oregon's Senator Wayne Morse, Ohio's ex-Governor Frank Lausche, Minnesota's Harold Stassen, pours scorn on Old Guard Republicans, Negro-baiters and anti-Semites...
Along the way, Gunther gleaned many a curious fact. The annual per capita Coca-Cola consumption in New Orleans is 120 bottles; in New York City, six bottles. The names of the New England towns of Berlin, Calais, Paris and Peru are locally pronounced Berlin, Callus, Pay-rus, Pee-ru. Los Angeles ("Iowa with palms") is the world's second largest Mexican city...