Word: humanizing
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...sprung up a class of biographers depending for their fame and popularity more on their ability to write entertainingly than on their qualifications, if any, as scholars and historians. Their main purpose has been to entertain, and since the general public is more interested in people that are human, perhaps even a bit naughty, this new school of semi-historical writers has led to the exposing of one shibboleth aften another, the rendering of innumerable veils, the puncturing of bubbles, and the over-turning of practically all the figures which tradition, sentiment, patriotism, and whatnot, had caused to be raised...
...Noel one evening two years ago at the Harvard Union, where he showed a complete moving picture record of the expedition. Captain Noel was appointed photographer of both expeditions to Mt. Everest, and therefore is regarded as an excellent authority on what actually happened. His new book gives a human account of all the exploration that has ever taken place in the region of Mt. Everest in southern Tibet. Going back to the discovery in 1852 that "Peak XV," 29145 feet, was the highest mountain in the world, Captain Noel tells of the disguised surveyors who spent years...
...little book entitled "Happiness" (Dutton, $1.00). William Lyon Phelps begins with the definition of the happiest person as "he who thinks the most interesting thoughts." Following up this rather Aristolelian idea to its logical conclusions, with a human and good common sense which take from the subject much of its inherent moralizing. Professor Phelps discusses in turn education, old age, health wealth and bovine contentment and their relation to the universally desired happiness, with a result that the 50 pages of the little book contain almost as many interesting and withal surprisingly novel ideas...
...supplementary volume in the series, I had an exceptional opportunity to observe the rare catholicity of his taste and the absolute independence of his judgment. He would not even consider anything that did not meet three tests: it must be simple, of superior literary technique, and of wholesome human sentiment. No author's name would recommend a selection deficient in any one requirement. For example, Stevenson's children's verses were mostly "adult opinions in grown-up language". "I wouldn't have in my book a poem with 'birdie' in it, even if Alfred Tennyson did write it." I fondly...
...eagerness among publishers to coax Author Asquith toward further indiscretions of the printed word. Her present volume is full of good sense: "Most men and women Eat, Drink, and Sleep too much to keep their minds active or their, bodies healthy." If such iconoclasms on Carelessness, Taste, Fashion, Human Nature, Fame. Character, Politics, had been devised by Mary Smith they would have remained unpublished. Devised by Margot Asquith, illustrated by anecdotes about her friends in the British peerage, their didactic importance is increased; they exhibit entertainingly the workings of a well-known mind...