Word: readings
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...good many things, such as man's penchant for war, the Pentagon bureaucracy, the self-inflated news commentator, free love, the power of mind over matter, and the flying saucer furore. The story centers around Kreton, a visitor from outer space who lives in the "suburbs of time," can read all the thoughts of men and animals, and considers our earth a mere toy to be played with...
...make such condensations, will go right on selling them, despite Classics-Crank Smith's outcry at the "preposterously arrogant assumption . . . that the adapter somehow knows how to write the book better than did the original author." And youngsters will go right on believing, quite erroneously, that they have read Two Years Before the Mast or A Tale of Two Cities or Moby Dick...
...poetry pay." Born a generation after his time, Traditionalist Noyes was sharply articulate about "that curious modern tolerance for things which ought not to be tolerated." Novelist Hugh Walpole was once kicked out of Noyes's house for suggesting to one of Noyes's daughters that she read James Joyce's Ulysses. "Filth," said Noyes, to whom the stream-of-consciousness device was nothing less than an emetic for "the entire contents of the garbage can and the sewer...
...Also Rises (20th Century-Fox). "Out here in the short-grass country we only read the books that have been banned in Boston, so our folks can either take Hemingway or leave him alone. In this case, they left him alone, and we got gored worse than the bullfighter. Personally, we prefer a picture to carry just one main story-something to match our third-grade mentality."-P.R., Ness City, Kans...
...There is the mystical quest of the Absolute: "Speech is fractional, silence is integral." Thoreau early loathed the time-serving bondage in which he pictured most of his fellow men as trapped, leading lives of quiet desperation: "What is sacrificed to time is lost to eternity." Regarding newspaper-reading as a monstrous waste of time, Thoreau later played the punster with this epigram: "Read not the Times. Read the eternities...