Word: gunther
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...LOST CITY by John Gunther. 594 pages. Harper...
...brash young Chicago Daily News correspondent named John Gunther, Vienna in the early '30s was about the most exciting assignment on earth. The city was charmed and doomed, as elegant, perverse and scandal loving as an aging archduchess. Though tiny post-Versailles Austria (pop. 6,760,000) teetered perennially on the edge of bankruptcy, the ancient Hapsburg capital was still the political and financial nerve center of the Balkans. As Europe slid into the chaos of depression and approaching war, the Viennese reveled in the musicmaking of Richard Strauss, Lotte Lehman and Bruno Walter; they entrusted their psyches...
...After reading your review of Max Gunther's The Weekenders [May 22], I feel compelled to tell Gunther that all is not lost! Why, our weekends are filled with meaningful things like hanging clothes, doing dishes, writing reports, mowing lawns, changing diapers, answering mail, hollering at children, pulling weeds, charcoaling hamburgers, dashing to church and watching TV (with snide comments, so people will know we're really too intelligent for TV). If Mr. Gunther knows of any place here in Ohio where some of that deplorable sin and dreary, hollow fun is going on, could he please...
Here Author Gunther, with borrowed research, shows mastery of an important technique of the searching-look book-the compounding of statistics from air and egg white. What counts as an "activity"? Brushing your teeth? Mowing the lawn with a toy gasoline tractor? If five members of one of Dr. Wylie's families watch Gunsmoke, does the researcher chalk up five activities? This is an important element in the art of making the world sound hollow when it is thumped. Another is the unvarying assumption that no one ever does anything because he likes it. If he goes skiing...
Since there is almost no human activity that cannot be accomplished, attempted, contemplated, or escaped from on a weekend, Gunther has a lot to cover. Or to look at it another way, he has endless opportunities to quote from other Hollow Worlders whose subjects are more specialized. His book is, in fact, an anthology of the maxims of Russell Lynes, David Riesman, Helen Gurley Brown, Vance Packard, Betty Friedan and William H. Whyte...