Word: morgans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...BECOMING AMERICAN by Ted Morgan (Sanche de Gramont); Houghton Mifflin; 336 pages...
...news: Sanche de Gramont is not a French count any more. Now the good news: he became an American citizen last year and, in the process, shed his title and the name his family has borne since "the morning hours of Western civilization." He is now Ted Morgan. Big changes: De Gramont, says Morgan, was the strict, rather European father, for instance, and something of a male chauvinist; Morgan, says Morgan, is a permissive American father of two, and an earnest believer in feminism. De Gramont kissed the slender hands of titled ladies, the rascal; Morgan, 45, helps his wife...
...author's good sense in becoming an American is readily apparent, especially to Americans. To him France is all but fossilized, and his highborn relatives there are wholly so, as the funniest parts of his account maliciously attest. (Ted Morgan's Uncle Armand once brought Marcel Proust to lunch. Afterward the due de Gramont, Armand's father, handed his guest book to the already famous author "and with the total disdain of the nobleman for the artist, said, 'Just your name, Mr. Proust. No thoughts.' ") The U.S. he sees as still an open society, free...
...Morgan is a man loopy with love for his new country, and the result is a book that is both refreshing and breathless. It has been a long time since anyone serenaded the present reality of the U.S. in such a hyperbolic manner. He cheers on conservatives who roar for less government and more cops, grumpily defending a dream of frontier capitalism. He applauds liberals-writing their concerned letters to the editor, demanding more government and less repression, peering worriedly at the future. To Morgan these factions do not reveal a paralysis of opposed fears but a lively and profitable...
...does, the reader thinks, his eyes opened by Morgan's perception of Americans as "the true existentialists ... Anxiety is the price that must be paid for boundless opportunity, including the opportunity to cheat the system, and not everyone can handle it." But passion does not improve the reasoning process, and when the author supports his arguments with windy civics lectures and careless unravelings from U.S. history, he can be more provocative than illuminating. Cases in point include a lame paragraph that seeks to prove "a high incidence of breakdown among men and women in public life" by linking...