Presidential Anecdotes / The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes
Boiler, Paul F. Jr. & Hall, Donald
teaching children to say "We love Comrade Stalin better than Mommy or Daddy" buying safety at too high a price ? She was never sure. But she knew she was not the only one to feel moral qualms...
...She saw it without sentimentality, as she saw everything else, including the limits of human ability to transcend inhuman treatment...
...I THE ULTIMATE RESOURCE I by well-known economist Julian L Simon backs up these asser- I tions with U.S...
...PRESIDENTIAL ANECDOTES Paul F. Boller, Jr...
...Theodore Dreiser offered H.L...
...Coolidge: "You'll never get over it...
...But she knew she was not the only one to feel moral qualms in the midst of surviv~il anxieties...
...Many Presidents of the United States have been profoundly mediocre men, and have known it...
...This is no doubt because Hall is himselfa writer of verse who shares with his colleagues a tendency to inflate the importance of the lyrical expositions of neuroses that for the most p a r t compose twentieth-century poetry...
...In any event it is funny, and sad, to see so many tal ented men coveting the benediction of a handful of Swedish professors...
...government and I U.N...
...Speaking of the selfless joy prisoners showed at the release of their fellows, she says "To see someone emerging on the far side of the barbed wire was to make contact with freedom...
...The sleepy, laconic Coolidge was an American original...
...Four issues $12.50...
...I Population growth has its I costs...
...whereas the politician, however exalted, is installed in office by the electorate for a limited period of time, and is all the while at the mercy of various unlovely special interest groups...
...Reading through them I found the writers more arrogant than the P r e s i d e n t s . This seems to me fitting and proper as the writer, after all, maintains sovereignty over his Mitchell S. Ross is author of The Literary Politicians and An Invitation to Our Times...
...On the whole he handles it well, although there are too many uninteresting stories about overrated modern poets for my taste...
...President, I'm from Boston...
...In the end, though, humility and skepticism fuse with the grander aspects of her nature to give the book its profoundly affirmative impact...
...After t h a t , it numbs and destroys the strongest...
...I Instead--though it is hard to I believe--natural resources and I energy have been getting tess scarce for decades, as seen I in their falling prices over the I long run...
...Mencken a piece of the action if Dreiser could sail triumphantly to Stockholm...
...Our funniest Presidents have been two vastly different men, Abraham Lincoln and Calvin Coolidge...
...Between the covers of these two books you will find a festival of Americana that will fill you with patriotic pride and encourage you to let loose with a few Bronx cheers...
...I think Wystan Auden should be next, then Pablo Neruda, then me and that's a cold, considered, objective judgment...
...statistics, together with I I solid empirical analysis...
...More than once, she owed her life to somebody else's need for atonement...
...He had to be conducted reverentially to maybe Shaw . . . . Maybe I'm being over-optimistic but I wouldn't have accepted it if I hadn't thought I could beat the r a p . " Well, he was being over-optimistic: In the six years of life that remained to him after winning the Prize, Steinbeck published nothing...
...They yield no grand generalizations about the nature of writers or Presidents, save the obvious one that eminentoes are people, too...
...said Warren Harding...
...L_ THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982 39 is improving rather than deteri- I orating...
...But in the long run the I benefits of additional people I outweigh the costs...
...they are tasty all the same...
...Dreiser and Roethke, by the way, never won it...
...Tm a Ford, not a Lincoln," declared Gerald Ford...
...We are not "running out" of natural resources...
...I've always been afraid of it because of what it does to people...
...Centre for Conflict Studies, University of New Brunswick Fredericton, N.B., E3B 5A3 Canada Telephone: (506) 453-4978 Massachusetts was once greeted at the White House by an excited guest: "Mr...
...Economic growth due to more babies and I immigrants is likely to make the I U.S and the world less-polluted...
...Rutherford B. Hayes, known as His Fraudulency after his dubious victory over Samuel Tilden in the 1876 election, felt no urge to prove his bona tides by running for a second term...
...So call the books puddings without themes if you like...
...Even so, many writers have f e l t moved to act like politicians on occasion, particularly when contemplating that Scandinavian chimera, the Nobel Prize...
...I I _9 Already highly praised by I II Nobel prize-winners and pres- I idents of the American I Economic Association: I "A first-class book of great I II importance...
...Oxford University Press / $14.95 THE OXFORD BOOK OF AMERICAN LITERARY ANECDOTES Edited by Donald Hall / Oxford University Press / $15.95 Mitchell S. Ross own talent...
...Why shouldn't we begin mending and weaving and doing whatever is n e c e s s a r y , " he wrote to his editor, " t o bring the Nobel in poetry to America...
...In the book of literary anecdotes, Donald Hall is faced with the problem of sifting and selecting his material...
...There are hundreds of wonderful stories in them...
...I am a man of limited talents from a small town...
...The supply of cropland I is increasing around the world I And pollution in the U.S...
...I am heartily tired of this life of bondage, responsibility and toil," he said...
...Adversity purifies, she observed, but only up to a point...
...Lincoln viewed life with a lofty cynicism and lightened his sadness with laughter: Recall his reading from Artemus Ward before announcing the Emancipation Proclamation to the seated secretaries of his cabinet...
...John Steinbeck worried about the effect of t h e Prize on its recipients...
...I Ben Wa ttenberg (Syndica ted columnist) I I _9 Rave reviews in Fortune, I II Business Week, The-New York I Times, Washington Post, I London Observer, London I Evening Standard, and many I ! other top periodicals...
...Several years later, after Sinclair Lewis had become the first American author to win the Prize, Dreiser climaxed a period of unpleasantness between the two men by slapping Lewis's face in public...
...Who can read that and doubt that despair is a sin...
...is on the decline...
...These anecdotes handsomely illustrate the vanities and cupidities of great men...
...I and richer in natural resources and standard of living for future I generations...
...contrast, the egotism of Presidents has often been tempered by an understanding of political reality...
...S t a r t the ball," he wrote, "and if I snake the forty thousand--isn't that what the lucky mutt is supposed to draw?you get five thousand...
...Break open the Wild Turkey and strike up the band...
...When Millard Fillmore was offered an honorary degree from Oxford University he turned it down, explaining, "No man should, in my judgment,~ accept a degree he cannot read...
...There was no question of envying the man who at the moment personified freedom...
...the gates to ensure that he d i d n ' t ]D spill the precious gift he had . [ ~ y recovered...
...A. v. Hayek I (Nobel laureate) I "In his favor Professor Simon I has only a simple t)air of I I virtues: his facts are right and I II his ideas make sense...
...The poet Theodore Roethke was another who felt himself deserving of the arctic laurel...
...The former Governor of He or She Who reads The American Spectator Ought also to read a new international journal dealing with low-intensity conflict--the wars that are occurring everywheremand ways in which governments, the media, and the public respond...
...In Presidential Aneadotes, Paul Boiler simply and sensibly calls the roll of the forty Presidents, introducing each with a brief, fluent narrative" to which some briefer anecdotes are then tagged on...
...For one thing I don' t remember anyone doing any work a f t e r getting it except These collections of anecdotes are consistently amusing...
...I I I I Cut out this ad and send with I $14.50 plus name and address to I PRINCETON UNIVERSITY I PRESS, 41William Street...
...When freedom appeared, all ignoble sentiments were hushed...
Vol. 15 • March 1982 • No. 3
