Word: trivia
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...world's longest mustache? Who was the world's most productive mother? No standard reference book troubles with such trivia, but an offbeat guide called The Guinness Book of Records answers such questions with gusto. And because it does, Guinness has become a useful handbook for any newspaperman who wants to spice a story with a few superlatives. Last week the second U.S. edition was rolling off the presses with the latest answers to unlikely questions: the world's mustache champ, says the new Guinness, is Masudiya Din. a Bombay Brahman who sports...
...ghostly, ghastly Berlin of the '20s and '30s in a raspy voice of tuneless authority. The Brecht on Brecht company of six actors is consistently bold, often astonishing, rarely commonplace. And doing Brecht at all is a salient rebuke to Broadway's timorous titans of trivia...
Part of the recent widespread effort of historians to compile source material on the great 18th century Americans,* the two Hamilton volumes are primarily intended for the use of other historians, and like other such collections are choked with trivia. But Hamilton's pen is so sharp and blunt by turn that the letters, notes and official papers, assembled by Editors Syrett and Cooke, contain surprisingly lively material for the nonhistorian, and certain sections read like an epistolary novel...
Wrathful Prophet. As he grew deafer, he became more paranoiacally suspicious of everyone. He accused musicians of deliberately misreading his music, publishers of trying to cheat him, friends of betraying him. Cooped up alone in his house, he feuded endlessly with servants over trivia, described in minute detail how "brutish" they were. But he reserved his sternest strictures for his nephew Karl...
Finally, Albert Sciaki's review of The American Dream, like Altbach's condescending advice, is almost unworthy of publication. Of course there are plenty of intellectuals hungry for a theater that will offer up some good satire; but most would rather starve than gorge to death on the trivia of Edward Albee. Sciaki loves the play because "the supports of American middle class life are battered one by one." He fails to see that Albee isn't a really political playwright, and that his "attack" is limited to the images rather than the supports of middle-class life. Moreover, Albee...