From Publishers Weekly
Barnes (1889-1968) was an academic who helped found the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote editorials for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain and traveled among the East Coast intelligentsia from the days of Woodrow Wilson through the Cold War. This slight book, by Barnes's son, an Arizona psychiatrist, is neither a full biography nor a psychological portrait; rather, the collection of anecdotes reads like family nostalgia, made public because they capture an unusual man and his era. A vigorous ideological opponent of Prohibition, Barnes was ``certainly not a thwarted apothecary,'' eagerly mixing alcoholic potions. He liked to classify men by the cars they drove-he was a ``Hupmobile Man''-and followed his friend H.L. Mencken in lamenting American idiocies. He was an atypical father, highly opinionated and often present, and he kept faux plumbing in the outhouse of the family's upstate New York farmhouse to fool visitors. As he was expiring, his last words damned Richard Nixon. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
