Word: wilfrid
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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READ Pauline Kael's I Lost It at the Movies and all the autobiographical sidetracks over psychic frustrations and coed heartbreak, though usually filled with raucous humorous, seem part of an introverted cultural temperament spent somewhere in the '50's, dated with Salinger and old Italian films. Read Wilfrid Sheed's Max Jamison, the chronicle of an honest theater critic's fall, and the author's ruthless lapsed-Catholic cynicism as he looks at a mass culture eating its discriminators might take you back to the self-protective cliques of '60's bourgeois intelligentsia...
...Compleat Naturalist: A Life of Linnaeus by Wilfrid Blunt. 256 pages. Viking. $14.95. The study of 18th century science can be an ennobling exercise. Outstanding men rose to survey and catalogue Nature's radiant data into logical systems. In Sweden, Carl Linne -Linnaeus to the world-collected, named and scientifically organized plants for the first time in history. Wilfrid Blunt's richly decorated biography admirably illustrates how Linnaeus' single mindedness and plodding devotion to stamens and pistils laid the foundation of modern botany...
...Jamison, by Wilfrid Sheed. A scalpel-sharp dissection of a critic criticizing himself...
...Author Wilfrid Sheed, in the recently published Max Jamison, commented most appropriately when he said: "I am not against youth as such. They are wonderfully teachable. But that they should be teaching us; that we should invest them with oracular powers, read into their shrugs and moans some great gnostic wisdom-this is an American superstition so crass that one scarcely knows where to begin with...
...among the innumerable merits of Max Jamison that Novelist Wilfrid Sheed provides a serious, pertinent answer to this old question. His hero, Max Jamison, is a drama critic by function but a critic by an act of nature: "He preferred a good mechanic to a bad poet from the first." Max is a critic in the way that the 747 flies, the tiger stalks, and water boils at 212° Fahrenheit. He could get irate at a three-minute egg for being a four-minute egg. Before he is even married to her, one of his wives looks...