Minority Report (Maryland Paperback Bookshelf) - Softcover

Mencken, H. L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801856582 ISBN 13: 9780801856587

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997

Synopsis

"The most expensive thing on this earth is to believe in something that is palpably not true."

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."

"Metaphysics is a refuge for men who have a strong desire to appear learned and profound but have nothing worth hearing to say."

"Out of the past it comes, and as vibrant, penetrating, and provocative as I have ever heard it―the voice of H. L. Mencken, proclaiming his shrewd truths and magnificent prejudices with a pungent clarity possessed by no other critic of our times."―Edward Weeks, Atlantic

"This is Mencken, all right, authentic and inimitable. Some of it is Vintage Mencken, with the bouquet and body that delighted connoisseurs for thirty years; some of it is Outrageous Mencken, dispensing soda-pop and, tongue in cheek, gravely assuring the brainless that it is the true, the blushing Hippocrene; but all of it is the One and Only Mencken, flashing, sparkling and as stimulating to swift endeavor as the sting of a wasp."― New York Herald Tribune

In 1956 Mencken could look back on a long and distinguished career that included years at the top of his profession, the publication of three volumes of memoirs, and a steady stream of journalism that made him loved and hated, sometimes by the same person. For Minority Report, he read through his notebooks, extracting those pieces he thought most true, most pertinent, most precise, or most likely to blow the dust out of a reader's brain.

"He is a delight to read―a little at a time, which one must do in order to fully enjoy the old master's sledgehammer effect."― San Francisco Chronicle

About this title

Review:

The great skeptic and prose stylist H.L. Mencken had a lifelong habit of keeping notebooks that he'd plumb for ideas. He eventually collected many brief essays from his notebooks and published them as Minority Report, claiming in the book's introduction that the pieces had been selected at random. That may be true, but as Mencken's writing discipline seemed to require him to always produce elegant prose, it's fair to say that his random notebook entries are superior to the polished essays of many other writers. Mencken was simply a national treasure, and Minority Report, as it contains a great many of his observations on a wide variety of subjects, is a good place to begin to get a taste of his eccentrically intelligent style.

Book Description:

With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken’s death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: Happy Days, Heathen Days, Newspaper Days, Prejudices, Treatise on the Gods, On Politics, Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, Minority Report, and A Second Mencken Chrestomathy.

About this edition

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0801856582
• ISBN 13: 9780801856587
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304