Word: self
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...liberates the vandal to travel--you never saw a bigoted, opinionated, stubborn, narrow-minded, self-conceited, almighty mean man in your life but he had stuck in one place since he was born." --MARK TWAIN...
Along the way he twisted an aged form--the travel narrative--into something uniquely American. Twain didn't just describe exotic sights; he thoroughly reimagined them with self-deprecation and enough comic invention to keep the reader guessing what really happened. He also demolished the writerly veneration of the Old World at the expense of the New. Yes, Americans could be boorish and loud, but Europe could be tired and sad. Be proud, he said to the home folks. Besides, the food over here is lousy...
Five homes. Three country estates. Luxury cars. Private jets. Thousands of bottles of fine wine in the cellars. Chauffeurs, housekeepers, financial advisers and staffers galore. Yes, the self-made British magazine magnate Felix Dennis is living the high life, and he is open--nay, brazen--about his desire to make more money, and lots of it. Dennis, the founder in 1995 of the bawdy "lad" magazine Maxim (which he sold last year with two smaller publications for a reported $240 million), is from the "greed is good" school of business. Worth as much as $900 million, he estimates, the author...
This one is unique in that buttoned-down field, though, owing to its massive authorial flamboyance. A born contrarian and self-promoter with a taste for the outrageous pronouncement, Dennis is given to advice like "If it flies, floats or fornicates, always rent it." A published poet, Dennis loads the pages with dozens of quotations from such literary luminaries as Goethe and T.S. Eliot. By turns pretentious and earnest, the book is sui generis. At worst, it reads like a huge ego trip. But the author is nothing if not entertaining, even inspiring. The unvarnished title says it all: Dennis...
...fitting that the smug Alter Eco's title is a twist on the word ego, because the show is a perfect marriage of sanctimony and self-regard. It's ecotistical. It's compostentatious. Grenier and company mean it to be aspirational--it's cool to be green!--but the effect is exactly the opposite. Hey, I compost and recycle too, I think as I watch. Do I look like that big a tool...