Word: rosten
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Passions and Prejudices, Leo Rosten...
PASSIONS AND PREJUDICES: OR, SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE PEOPLE by Leo Rosten McGraw-Hill; 188 pages...
...book with the subtitle Some of My Best Friends Are People should be flung across the room. The reader is urged to employ this method of criticism with the volume at hand, a collection of Leo Rosten's light essays. Book flinging improves the temper of the flinger, and in this case it improves the book as well. Passions and Prejudices, when it is retrieved and smoothed out, gets down to business and stops apologizing for its intelligence...
...Rosten provides, as usual, superior night-table reading for those who like to fall asleep laughing, or even to stay awake thinking. One of his best efforts is a warning to travelers who contemplate using phrase-book French. He reports that when he tried to communicate with a ticket agent in Paris, the following discourse took place...
...essays are comic turns; Rosten does equally well at carrying weighty subjects lightly. His ideas are unstartling, and in fact they would seem ordinary, if clarity and common sense were ordinary. "I wonder how those faculty members who aided campus revolt will come to terms with themselves in a calmer future," he muses, writing about student takeovers of universities in the '60s. "Did they not give away rights they would have refused to surrender to, say, an investigating committee of Congress, or a reactionary board of trustees, or a witch-hunting press? Did they...