The Best is None to Good

This issue has to do with hard-to-find or underpublished books.

In A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut writes: (page 99)

"snatchers. Sometimes I wish it [our country] had been. What
has happened instead is that it [our country] was taken over
by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone
Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable.

"I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really
scary reality TV show. I have one reality show
that would really make your hair stand on end:
“C-Students from Yale."

"George W. Bush has gathered around him
upper-crust C-students who know no history or
geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists,
aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly,
psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical
term for smart, personable people who have no
conscIences.

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly
respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has
appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medical
text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey
Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the
Medical College of Georgia, and published in
1941. Read it!"

Yea verily! To spare yourself the effort of trying to find a copy online, or of trying to buy a used copy, simply enter the author’s name and the title in Google. The first hit up offers a PDF free of charge. One need only download it onto one’s desktop, to be read at leisure. Or, if one has a spare ream of paper and a loose-leaf binder one can print one’s own copy (485 pp) at considerably less cost than a purchase at the posted Amazon price.


If one treasures one’s own sanity, Vonnegut’s 145 pages of readable type will help in hanging on to it.

Quick mentions: Why? What happens when people give reasons. . .and why .by Charles Tilly. Malcolm Gladwell kicked this into view in “The New Yorker,” but it languishes still and may be missed by people who might regret having missed it. Then there is On Apology by Aaron Lazare. “Publisher’s Weekly” says (Starred review.) “Everybody on earth could benefit from this small but essential book.” Seconded and passed.