Word: joads
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...present reviewer had obeyed the impulse to do his stint after reading only the first part of the book, he would have damned the product utterly; he would indeed have sentenced Mr. Joad to spend his days and his nights with the study of Addison. More persistent reading of The Citizen of the World papers and less credulous perusal of the Hearst papers might have guided this critic of our national failings toward complete triumph. In such a volume as this, the only excuse for its being is found either in clever irony or in scintillating wit. Mr. Joad rarely...
...Joad's thesis is that we are a decadent people in the same sense that Imperial Rome was decadent. And the cause for our speedy distingretation he assigns to our tendency to pursue truth, beauty and goodness. As has been already intimated, Part One--On truth--falls utterly to uphold its share in the proof. What is said here of America applies equally to any civilized country. Constantly recurring illustrations, not New York, constitute admission of inconclusive evidence...
...Thrasymachus, Mr. Joad deals with morals after the fashion of one salvaging a sunken ship. Only yardarms of convention rise above the water, but when Mr. Joad has raised the hull he exhibits how absurdly the masts are set in the vessel's keel, how outlandish is the gear and rigging fashioned haphazard by ancient social navigators. He is very scornful indeed of "that part of human nature which expresses itself in what is called morality," but vitiates his discussion by the employment of flippant paradox, unrepresentative facts and overstrained, somewhat splenetic deductions. For example, this very affecting statement...