Word: jedediah
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...corrosion of popular culture is original, very sophisticated, and compelling. But if you can cut through the occasional tediousness, what is left is the author as powerful exemplar of embodied faith and conviction, his emotion rousing correlative emotion in the reader. There is remarkable moral force behind Jedediah Purdy's introspection; a generation could do worse than to be moved by the example and the lucid expression of his passion...
...Jedediah Purdy...
Roger D. Hodge is not afraid of this kind of behavior. His Harper's Magazine review of Jedediah Purdy '97's first book, For Common Things, is one of the most vitriolic and least clever put-downs I have ever read; when its negativity is contrasted with Purdy's obvious and infectuous enthusiasm for the many things he loves and praises, the review also begins to seem strikingly sad. In his preface, Purdy boyishly admits that his book is "one young man's letter of love": it is this vulnerability that makes Purdy a moving and an effective narrator. That...
Hodge has not read Purdy carefully enough to express himself coherently on the topic, but one senses that Hodge's criticism is built upon umbrage at the fact that For Common Things, at its heart, is not about intellectual arguments but rather about Jedediah Purdy's passionate hopes. The instance of an idealist is offensive and risible to the ironic mind that can not stand to see ideals expressed or fulfilled: "our being human," writes Purdy, "has become a strong argument against cleaving to demanding values, or respecting them in others." One can sense in Hodge the resentfulness born...
Even before its publication, Purdy's book provoked heavy return fire from the chattering classes it draws a bead on. A long review in Harper's magazine, facetiously titled Thus Spoke Jedediah and reeking of the quippy, jaded wit that Purdy fears the nation is mired in, opened by poking fun at Purdy's past and went on to brand him--ironically, of course--a "young sage," dismissing his ideas as "second- and third-hand musings." The New York Observer, a metropolitan weekly that is to the disaffected Eastern elite what the Daily Racing Form is to gambling addicts, found...