Word: public
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Handlin calls Gore Vidal's Burr and 1876 "inventions that disguised the poisonous portrayal of the early Republic in a fantastic tale of corruption, greed and sex." In a chapter entitled "The Diet of a Ravenous Public," Handlin rips the 'factional' historians to shreds. He assails Ragtime, calling "racial prejudice the crutch on which the book limps along," and renders equal treatment to critics that lapped...
Aside from his views of where historians have gone wrong. Handlin proposes a strong if not portentous case for accuracy. He has paid close attention to history, but the same challenge could be issued to every academic discipline which proposes to teach that which the public could not discover for itself. The book is nothing new, just a dressy version of earlier ideas filled with one clear message. Historians should try not to disappoint Handlin again...
Brezhnev was last seen in public October 8, when he returned from East Germany...
Sagan has a history of this sort of dabbling. First swept into the public eye on the coat-tails of the Viking missions to Mars as one of the expedition's moving minds, his impudence, optimism, and imagination, won him national attention. Johnny Carson has toasted him. The New Yorker has profiled him, countless universities have ensnared him as their graduation speaker. He made movies with Francis Ford Coppola, chaired the National Book Awards, and rubbed elbows with celebrities of every ilk. He is, if you will, the shooting star of the astronomical profession...
Insofar as a unifying thread in this collection of essays exists, it is Sagan's series of ill-disguised emotional crusades. His first mission, of course, is to dangle accessible science provacatively before the public. A second is his virulent attack on the theory-mongers of science, the "paradoxers"--those irresponsible practitioners who propose theories without ample evidence, make lots of noise in support of them, and then fall niftily by the wayside when someone with the facts comes along. Sagan debunks them in several delightful essays, taking to task, among others, the proponents of mathematically gifted horses and human...