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Title: Mencken Chrestomathy by H.L. Mencken ISBN: 0-394-75209-0 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 12 April, 1982 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.82 (11 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A great read
Comment: I really like this book. Mencken's prose and unflinching attitude is like no other author I have read. I don't know if they used the middle finger in the early 1900s but if so, then HLM was its personification. If you were to tally his word usage in the book I believe "idiot", "imbecile", "buffoon", "moron" and "mountebank" would be near the top.
This book contains one of my favorite essay and the single biggest reason to own this book, his piece on the critical process. It's only a 10 page essay but it's probably the most eloquent. For whatever reason he put it around page 450, but I would recommend reading it first. It puts a reader in the right frame of mind for reading Mencken's essays. He explains a worthwhile critic is not so much concerned with truth or detail. Instead a truly great critic takes the target of the criticism and uses it to develop his own original ideas. It separates those who would just be archivists with those who would be artists. Clearly, Mencken was not concerned with the former, he was concerned with art and he was an artist.
Rating: 5
Summary: The best book ever written
Comment: Perhaps I am biased. Mayhap I am gushing. I don't mind- I have read a good couple thousand books in my lifetime, and I have reviewed a few dozen for Amazon.com. Yet this is the one I keep coming back to read, year after year. As time goes by I find myself revising the scale of Mencken's achievement upwards and upwards, especially knowing that the only comparison is to other mere mortal writers.
What makes this book brilliant is its terse structure- it is fragmented and in short pieces, and this produces his intense compact wit in wave after wave of the finest observations and thoughts to come out of mortal man since Tom Sawyer. A Mencken Chrestomathy utterly fails to do badly at every turn.
If you have glanced at this book, and have even a tiny thought at not buying at least two copies, shoot yourself in the foot for punishment, then go buy a dozen copies and pass them out to your superior friends as rewards for their sagacity and charm and as a reward for their loyalty. But if you have little humanity and wish to punish a friend or make their lives more miserable, do not tell them of this book, and leave it right where it is.
I give no book this high a regard. But I give this one my complete, unconditional support. If you have the means, I suggest buying a thousand copies and distributing it among the hungry of mind for the wonderful elixer of an effect Mencken has upon the mind.
The only thing bad about this book is the covers are too close together.
Rating: 5
Summary: Genius lives today
Comment: This book changed my life. It is the first of the dozen or so books that I have read by Mencken, but still my favorite. Mencken has opened up a whole new world for me. His irreverent debunking of favorite quacks have prompted me to look anew at a few of my own. His incredible knowledge of the English language has raised the standards I expect others to meet, not a little. And my vicarious contact with his world has made me work to improve my own.
Mencken, I am convinced, was a genius whose writings will live long even into the next century. His writing is the only one that I feel compelled to read aloud to my wife, arms raised in excitement and for emphasis, daring her to contradict the glory of his prose.
What contemporary American writer can match his mastery? I've read a lot, but I can't give even an approximation. His style is elegant, distinctively American, and a joy to read. Something like listening to a singer who you know has an absolute control of her material, a voice that does exactly what she intends, and the aesthetic sense of an angel.
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Title: The Vintage Mencken by Alistair Cooke, H.L. Mencken ISBN: 0679728953 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 17 March, 1990 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: A Second Mencken Chrestomathy by H.L. Mencken ISBN: 0679428291 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 17 January, 1995 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: The American Language by H.L. MENCKEN ISBN: 0394400755 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 27 June, 1936 List Price(USD): $55.00 |
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Title: Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (Maryland Paperback Bookshelf) by H. L. Mencken ISBN: 0801856582 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: July, 1997 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Treatise on the Gods (Maryland Paperback Bookshelf) by H. L. Mencken ISBN: 080185654X Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: July, 1997 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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