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Chapter One presents a thumbnail sketch of the golden years of rock and roll, as viewed by Guralnick while growing up around Boston. It's a few quick steps from Arnie "Woo Woo" Ginsberg to the Club 47 folk revival to Leadbelly to the blues. Guralnick then spends exactly one chapter on the history of the blues, intended primarily for the benefit of the beginner. ("For our purposes I think it is enough to say that the blues came out of Mississippi, sniffed around in Memphis and then settled in Chicago where it is most likely it will peacefully live...
...stories, he quickly points out, are Humphrey Bogart and Dennis Hopper... whoopee-do!). There's a biography of Nathan Pusey, which explains the "bitter man" as an evangelical rationalist; it is followed by a rogue's gallery of Pusey's administrators that includes some very outdated photographs and uncritical thumbnail biographies (MacGeorge Bundy's "academic speciality was American foreign policy," we are told...
...After six weeks of investigation, NASA's high-level review board proposed an explanation for the explosion of Apollo 13's oxygen tank. The blast was apparently caused by the failure of two thumbnail-sized automatic switches that are designed to shut off the oxygen tank's internal heater if its temperature rises above 80° F. Tests showed that the temperature, if unchecked, could soar as high as 1,000° and cause the electrical insulating material to flake off. The arcing that results can ignite the insulation. Heat from the fire expands the compressed semiliquid...
...week as they arrive is an often agonizing, always time-consuming process, even though many swiftly prove 1) badly written, 2) wretchedly edited, and 3) largely unnecessary. In this issue, instead of choosing, we attempt to give the reader a sampling of the American literary overflow by presenting thumbnail reviews of one whole week of books (excepting a handful, mostly how-to guides and Christmas specials) to be published between...
...fond if not indulgent critic, though, Hofstadter praises the vitality of his progressives and probes their private lives and times. In surprisingly effective thumbnail sketches, Turner appears as a generous teacher and enthusiast who would never have survived in the publish-or-perish world of today's scholar. During his lifetime he signed contracts to write at least nine books which he never finished, though he left 34 file cases of notes...