CLOSE TO COSMIC
Mayer, Milton
Close to Cosmic Majority of One, by Sydney J. Harris. Houghton Mifflin. 305 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by Milton Mayer T'HIS is a collection of some of Sydney Harris' five-times-a-week pieces that...
...Me is able to criticize people—and .Civilizations—brilliantly while they pbink he is entertaining them...
...But he belongs with Wilde—and not beneath him as an aphorist—and not with Voltaire...
...His performance, as an American newspaper columnist, is unfailingly excellent and usually faultless...
...If you don't get him locally, get him here...
...He leaves 'em with a knowing smile, which, as I say, may not be what's good for 'em...
...t His weakness, like Wilde's, is his Writing...
...iStrictly personal are what they are not...
...Instead of knowing what it's all about, Harris knows what the important things are all about and what p important about the rest...
...Nobody else in the business—and it is a killing business, five times a week —is talking to the point with Harris' clear blue depth of perception...
...Of its kind, it's too good...
...No-mody gets hurt, which is certainly a •good thing...
...He takes his readers right to the edge of consciousness—the consciousness that he is talking about me—and there he performs...
...Without putting too high a premium on the category, I find him absolutely the best of our commentators, and of his sapient kind the only...
...Reviewed by Milton Mayer T'HIS is a collection of some of Sydney Harris' five-times-a-week pieces that appear in an ever increasing number of newspapers under the Icolumn title, "Strictly Personal...
...They come closer to being cosmic than any other American newspaper column, much closer than Walter Lippmann's...
...But he's a joy to read...
...but nobody feels hurt, ^fhich is 1«» certainly good...
...His study of jthe great books hasn't hurt him in |his respect, either...
...He was born intelligent, and he has become |nuch more intelligent...
...He is a radical and a catholic in the classic sense of those terms...
Vol. 21 • December 1957 • No. 12
