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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
More interesting, provocative than today's editorials,
By A Customer
This review is from: Impossible H. L. Mencken, The (Paperback)
This is a collection of Mencken's newspaper columns from the early 1900s to his very last column written in November 1948. Some of the columns are only prototypes of larger works on the American language and contemporary literature and a few of them, such as the piece on Valentino, were re-written and enlarged by Mencken for books like "A Mencken Chrestomathy." Despite this, Mencken is interesting throughout the book, especially on politics and travel. In his career, Mencken attended almost all of the Democratic and Republican conventions for president and perhaps because his reports were written before television, they are much more evocative than anything written today. He notices what the delegates were wearing, what music was playing, what sort of intrigues were being plotted behind closed doors. Mencken downplayed his skills as a reporter; he claimed that he never got a scoop in his career. What makes his writing worth reading is a sense of humor and his opinionated voice. His readiness to call someone a "moron" can be tiring at times, but he is refreshingly blunt compared to today's political commentators. He is probably best on Harding and Coolidge; worse on Franklin Roosevelt, who inspires anti-New Deal harangues. Mencken claimed that he had from an early age made up his mind on every conceivable subject, yet his opinions seem far less predicable and less readymade than anything in today's newspapers. In one of his columns, he reports on a 1928 Ku Klux Klan march on Washington D.C. The purpose of the Klan "is organizing inferiorities into a mystical superiority" and he writes that it is impossible to look on the robed and jeweled Klansmen "without snickering." He notes that the Klan members are clearly from the lower economic stratum and "that these poor folks are exploited by rogues is an unpleasant detail, but certainly nothing new in the world." In one column, Mencken is able to make the Klan ridiculous and place their significance in a larger context without becoming shrill. These days Mencken is routinely attacked for using slang words to describe ethnic groups in terms now considered to be unacceptable. He did write to provoke people and, judging by his diaries, Mencken could be pretty callous. However, as Gore Vidal writes in the introduction, public action is what counts more than anything else. There are a lot of examples here of a writer who could take decent stands on the issues of the day and who believed in fair play. In one column, he calls for the end of "The Lynching Psychosis;" in another, he laments the US persecution of two radicals; in another, he calls for the US government to admit a larger number of the Jewish victims of Nazi terror. Throughout his career, Mencken believed that the United States had no business interfering in the affairs of other countries and should never get involved in foreign wars. Compare this attitude to that of the contemporary editorial writer who blanches at an ethnic slur, but enthusiastically calls for bomb strikes on Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, etc. A thoughtful reader might decide that Mencken was more humane than today's Christopher Hitchens' or Thomas Friedman's. This book has a provocative introduction written by Gore Vidal, which was the source of a literary spat between him and John Updike. In a review of this book collected in "More Matter," Updike writes sniffily about Mencken's lack of sympathy for people unlike himself and about Vidal's "sneering" introduction. In a response published in "The Last Empire," Vidal attacks Updike for simplistic patriotism and for signing on to the US war in Viet Nam. (An example of the genteel warrior that Mencken hated?) That Mencken could inspire a literary feud almost fifty years after his death is a testimonial of sorts.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Oh that we had a writer such as H.L. today............,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Impossible H L. Mencken (Hardcover)
brutally honest, rude, raw, and frightfully truthful, this is the best collection yet of America's most insightful writer. A must for anyone who has been beaten down by our simpering, back-slapping, ridiculously oversensitive and P.C. media.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best of the many Mencken anthologies,
By A Customer
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Impossible H. L. Mencken, The (Paperback)
Almost 700 pages in length, this book provides the reader with examples of Mencken's best writing from various times in his life and is far broader in scope than any other anthology published to date. Of particular interest are his columns written from Dayton, Tennessee during the Scopes Monkey Trial. An added treat is the foreward by Gore VidalSince writing this review, I have read H.L. Mencken on Religion, edited by S. T. Joshi. It is of the same high quality as this aqnthology. Additionally, after 50 years of looking, it provided me with the citation for Mencken's comment that the Ku Klux Klan was the secular arm of the Baptist and Methodist churches.
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