Word: zinssers
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After a patient wait, death came last week to Hans Zinsser, bacteriologist, physician, philosopher, poet, ironist, historian, raconteur. At 61, he died of chronic leukemia, a slow-moving, mysterious disease of the blood for which there is no known cure...
...clear that "R. S." and his old friend Hans Zinsser (Rats, Lice and History-TIME, Feb. 11, 1935) are one and the same man. Thanks to this adroit device, Dr. Zinsser eats, has and hands out whatever cake he pleases. As R. S. he shoots off his mouth to his heart's content...
...Biographer Zinsser, he gives...
...doctor, but As I Remember Him is not another doctor book. Zinsser is interested in R. S. as "a noticeably average representative of that educated middle class . . . nostalgically conservative, yet trying hard to fall in with the spirit of the times. . . ." By writing his life and, still more, his opinions, he hoped to give an image of a class, a generation and an age, "more or less as Henry Adams wrote about himself." The result is an ingratiating hodgepodge of reminiscence, ironic sentiment, anecdote, medical history, opinionation, earnest philosophy. As such the book is an excellent portrait of an aging...
...preface Hans Zinsser takes heart in a remark of Sainte-Beuve's: "Nothing is so painful to me as the disdain with which one often treats writers of the second rank, as if there were room only for those of the first." Considering the number and excellence of the second rank, As I Remember Him may belong, rather, to the third. But for any book half as abundant and a tenth as likable, there is room and welcome...