Word: shapiro
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Less than Swiftian (though not without an occasional flicker of appeal) are Shapiro's modest proposals, which include raising the minimum age for drivers' licenses to at least 30, denying foreign travel to children unless granted as a privilege from their school, putting dissidents on reservations, and destroying all concepts of adolescence. He cannot be serious; yet one pokes vainly through Shapiro's overcooked simplifications for a scrap of wit or irony. Finding none, the reader concludes that To Abolish Children is little more than a late-middle-age temper tantrum...
Edsel Margin III and Karl Shapiro agree with millions of other solidifying citizens that America is in the sticky clutches of its children. It makes these two men angry; it makes them nervous; it gives them sour stomachs...
...Karl Shapiro is Karl Shapiro, poet-professor (University of Illinois) and former Poetry magazine editor who won the hearts and votes of the 1945 Pulitzer Prize Committee with V-Letter and Other Poems, a collection of tough-but-oh-so-gentle verse that balanced war disillusionment with hope for a humane future. The conviction behind Shapiro's courage has long been that organized cultural activities subvert "the fine arts"; he sees the latest threat in a corrupting coalition of irresponsible youth and commercial clowns. In To Abolish Children, the title essay in his assortment of literary trade pieces wrapped...
Sloganeering. At 54, Shapiro feels that he has been back-stabbed by "the heirs to the kingdom of Wall Street-the latest generation of betrayers and destroyers . . . that practices infantilism on a scale which has never been seen...
Edsel Margin III, one of the three commissioners, is, like Karl Shapiro, apocalyptic and apoplectic, but he has a well-defined target: Benjamin Spock -not the war hater, but the baby lover. Margin creatively misinterprets Dr. Spock's book Baby and Child Care as a blueprint for totally permissive child-rearing, a Communist Manifesto of the U.S. infantocracy, the cause of all the troubles from Yalta to the Yippies...