San Antonio College Library

Best known for his writings on popular science and mathematics and as a skeptical commentator of the paranormal, Gardner has penned this collection of essays and book reviews that tackles every subject from the Wandering Jew legend and Buckley's religious convictions to astrology and word play.

"Each review approaches one work of literature--fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or drama--and is introduced with brief ready reference data: title, author, date of first publication, type of work, and a brief abstract of the book's content or impact. The interested reader will gain from the following 300-word review both an impression of the work's contents and an idea of the work's importance in the history of literature and ideas."--Publisher's note....

In this collection of essays and reviews spanning twenty-five years of criticism, Martin Amis asserts the writer's obligation to battle "not just cliches of the pen but cliches of the mind and cliches of the heart." He marshals the forces of his infamous arsenal: his language, his wit, and his intolerance for suffering fools to review, consider, and, in some cases, condemn. He takes to task the best and the brightest, including Cervantes and Milton,...

Essays about twenty-five books which the author feels have had a profound effect on the nation's culture and conscience.

Reviews movies such as China is near, Wild 90, How to save a marriage--and ruin your life, Sebastian, Poor cow, The fox, Planet of the apes, Sweet November, Doctor Faustus, Intolerance, Charlie Bubbles, The two of us, Bye bye Braverman, The good, the bad and the ugly, A matter of innocence, We still kill the old way, The secret war of Harry Frigg, 30 is a dangerous age, Cynthia, Here we go round the mulberry bush, The producers, Up the junction, A...

Downs uses great books to write the cultural history of society. His thesis is that the economic, social, and political behavior of a region, a nation, or even the world is shaped largely by the printed word. Concentrating on twenty-five publications from John Smith's General History of Virginia (1624) to C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South (1951), he analyzes the impact of written history and sociology on the intellectual and social life...