Word: mumford
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...first meeting Mumford's manner recalls an era that is dead or rapidly dying. Stately in his prose and his bearing, his voice rises from his chest in low modulated tones, while his accent, though definitely American, contains a touch of the British. Seated in his brown-hued study in formal repose, his solid features, white hair, and bushy white eyebrows suggest languid discussions, pipes and open fires...
...Mumford is a scholar in the old-style as well--not the product of assembly line education, but a thinker without titles, whose formal education was night school at the City College of New York. Mumford calls himself a writer, but it's probably for lack of a better word. "The orthodox name is philosopher," he says, "but a philosopher today is a specialist. I loathe the very notion of expert...
Over the years, Mumford has become known as a specialist in many fields--a tribute both to his vast learning and his stubborn refusal to confine himself to one discipline. Among the twenty-three volumes he's produced since 1922 are texts on Herman Melville, on the history of art and literature, on design and architecture and on moral philosophy. But perhaps his most famous and important work has been in urban affairs. Mumford was among the first Americans to study the problems of the cities systemically, and the ideas he formulated in the 1920's have, if anything, gained...
...TYPICAL of Mumford that he should have been most ahead of his time in urban affairs--an area where his thinking seems most at odds with the trends of modern scholarship. At a time when social scientists were carving up the urban field into fiefdoms--sociology, education, economics, politics--Mumford insisted on considering all the approaches together, and pioneered the study of man's "total" urban environment. Mumford became interested in the cities because he thought they were being ruined by a dangerous trend in human affairs: he uncontrolled spread of technology. In the Culture of the Cities, he cautioned...
...Mumford's critics have since portrayed him as an implacable foe of technology, a relic of the Victorian age who prattles mindlessly about how automobiles and jet-planes will be the doom of us all. Mumford himself finds it "hilariously funny that people think I despise technology." He doesn't: he wanted to be an electrical engineer before he set off on his writing career. It is just that while most people uncritically accept applied science for the wealth it creates, Mumford has remained an unswerving humanist, asking where man fits...