Word: self-taught
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Kick the Wind. Cornell owes its uniqueness to an unlikely alliance during the civil war between two New York state legislators: Ezra Cornell, the self-taught Quaker millionaire who organized Western Union, and Andrew D. White, an urbane Yaleman and sometime history professor. White dreamed of giving New York one great land-grant college of such broad learning that it would teach everything from art to agriculture. The idea shocked conservative Easterners, who thought of college as mainly for God and Greek. But Cornell rammed it through the legislature, chipping in $500,000 and his own 300-acre farm...
Here, everyone runs a seminar on the contents of Shaw's remarkably closed mind. Religion is hypocrisy. Armies are idiotic. The British upper classes are smugly ignorant of life; the lower classes are self-taught fanatics and uncouth blackguards. As destiny's dutiful darling, G.B.S. slays these asses with his jawbone. Minus his customary wit, Shaw is a nagging scold. In a final soliloquy, delivered with fine evangelistic fervor by Robert Preston, the great iconoclast pitiably begs for an icon worthy of his worship...
...unread clod. Ben flunked a French exam that meant getting into college. When Ben and Gloria go to bed together, and then agree to meet weekly for more extracurricular love and French lessons, a double irony is consummated. Her special pride was her fidelity; his was being a self-taught genius. The Wallachs drum a tattoo of laughs on The Tiger's hide, and just as expertly drain the comic pathos from The Typists, a tale of two office-worker mediocrities whose lives dim out like light bulbs...
Damaged Soles. "In my childhood." Chekhov used to say. with typically accurate restraint, "there was no childhood." His grim father was the self-taught son of one of the rare serfs in Russia who had been able to buy his family's freedom. He kept an anemic grocery store on the Sea of Azov, enrolled his son in a tailoring school as an economic practicality, once shouted at him. "You can't run about so much because you'll wear out your shoes." When a rat drowned in a vat of mineral oil in his store, Father...
...coming of age in New York City (1900-23). Incredibly garrulous and grotesque, the book is a disordered Horatio Alger story: escape from a poor Brooklyn boyhood, as it might have been written by Harpo Marx and Hieronymus Bosch working together. Wild philosophic maunderings sprinkled with a self-taught man's self-conscious display of highfalutin' acquaintances (Bergson, Nietzsche. Whitman) proclaim Miller's belief in the sovereignty of the heart over the mind. A nearly endless series of appallingly anatomical boy-meets-girl grapplings sometimes suggests that sex is the mystic key to magical joy, but often...