Word: lerner
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...spicy little tidbit is now a full-course feast for eyes and ears, an extravagant $3,000,000 cinemusical with four bright stars (Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan, Eva Gabor), a strong supporting cast, a topnotch director (Vincente Minnelli). words and music by My Fair Lady's Lerner and Loewe,* and some flooringly flamboyant sets and costumes by Cecil Beaton...
...States of America." This famed remark, attributed to Lord Bryce (The American Commonwealth), was a Briton's backhanded way of saying that the U.S. was a success. With few such perceptive quips but a relentless, mind-clogging avalanche of scholarly quotes, furrow-browed Columnist (New York Post) Max Lerner, 55, says much the same thing in his physically massive (1,036 pages) survey of America as a Civilization. The unavowed note of irony is that, like many a liberal-leftist prodigal son of the age, Lerner, who regularly scoffed...
...programmed flight over nearly every aspect of th, U.S. scene-from the birth of the blues to the death of the tycoon, from the flight to the suburb to the fight for collective bargaining, from the 'rise of the immigrant to the decline of premarital virginity. Columnist Lerner (he is also professor of American civilization at Brandeis University) has retained the old, deadening habits of speech-"vested power groups," "acquisitive society," "Barons of Opinion," "cult of property." His book is essentially a gigantic rehash of the works of other writers (in Lerner's lingo, it might be called...
Ectoplasmic Uplift. Lerner deserves credit for recognizing, in disagreement with the Toynbee-esque patternmakers, that the U.S. is not merely a subdivision of Western civilization but, despite acknowledged Western roots, a truly new world under the sun. Yet this vision, like a few others, just barely flickers through the verbal fog banks. Readers who get as far as page 673 will sharply question Lerner's assertion that the U.S. is in a "moral interregnum," distrusting the old gods and uncertainly waiting for new ones, and that (page 947) America is on a descending arc of "inner social and moral...
...outstanding interpreters of the U.S. scene achieved their insights by imposing a meaning-democratic, economic, social -on the rich diversity of America. Lerner argues merely that the diversity is the meaning, itself an insight but scarcely a major or original one. Trying valiantly to be Olympian, Lerner has suppressed his more obvious former prejudices-except perhaps the prejudice in favor of the strangely arid, yet emotionally pompous sociologist's view of man. The trouble is that little except diligence seems left of Pundit Lerner once the prejudice is gone. His middle-of-the-road stance leaves him not only...