Word: trivia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Space, Time & Snobbery. From the Terrace has all the O'Hara virtues and all the defects of those virtues. His ear for dialogue has never been truer, but when page after page of unselective trivia has been set down, the reader finds himself aching for an earplug. O'Hara continues to describe the nuances of social habit with rare authority in a society in which social flux continuously alters the symbols of prestige. But the snobbism of the right prep school, the right club, the right street in the right exurb becomes so intrusive that Terrace often reads...
...soft-sell" in presenting the American way of life is evidenced in the main floor exhibit entitled Face of America. Here are such typical trivia of American life as a page-by-page display of a Sunday Times, a football uniform, a showcase filled with election buttons, and a section of California redwood...
...result of such an overburdened schedule of trivia, over half of U.S. high schools have no foreign language requirement, no science requirement, and no mathematics requirement for graduation. There are no available facilities for advanced study in English literature. Where 75 per cent of our high schools offer typing courses, only 40 per cent have school newspapers appearing as regularly as once a month--and some of those are mimeographed. Advertising, shorthand, auto shop, and a half-term of empirical economics teaching you how to avoid being gypped when you purchase an automobile--these are the trade and social courses...
...NORTHERN LIGHT, by A. J. Cronin (308 pp.; Little, Brown: $4), finds Novelist Cronin (The Citadel, The Keys of the Kingdom) crusading again and moralizing again, but the muscles of his indignation have sagged. His wide-open target is the English "popular" press, which runs to sex, sadism and trivia. Small-town Newspaper Publisher Henry Page seems hardly the man to lift his lance off the ground, much less to slay the dragon. He has been twice mayor of Hedleston, and is the great-great-grandson of the founder of the respectable Northern Light. Unfortunately, he is the kind...
...MEET, by Evan Hunter (375 pp.; Simon & Schuster; $4.50). Nature is easily kept in check by powered lawn mowers in suburban Pinecrest Manor, an hour from Broadway, but human nature creates a thick underbrush of sin and suffering. With the dull Cape Cods, the boring neighbors, the endless trivia of gossip, there is not much to turn to for excitement. Architect Larry Cole, who loves his wife and two youngsters after eight years of faultless married life, turns to Margaret Gault, a beautiful blonde whose husband spends a lot of time in an aircraft factory...