Читать книгу Wickford Point онлайн

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The reviewers took it up with an enthusiasm symptomatic of group hysteria, but I should like to wager that not one of them read all the way through it. Southby sometimes would quote their best remarks with a deprecating sort of humor designed to show that he knew very well that the critics had been too kind.

A glamorous panorama of the history of American thought, moving in a scintillating progress.... We defy the reader to put down Dr. Southby's book once he has picked it up.

There is a magic in the style which defies analysis; it flows in a trenchant stream; it is a Thames of style, moving with a deceptive tranquility past the spires of a modern Oxford.

It costs five dollars, but it's worth five hundred. This means that you and I can read it. [This came from one of the lower, less literary journals, which reached the great half-tapped reservoir of the partially enlightened.]

It would be interesting, I repeat, to know just how many actually did read it. I know I never finished it, and consequently have no real right to discuss it, except in so far as The Transcendent Curve influenced the Doctor as an individual. It was an achievement such as that which Dr. Lowes very nearly brought off in The Road to Xanadu: it was a book for scholars, read by laymen. There could be no doubt about its scholarship, since it very nearly got its author the presidency of one of the larger Western universities—very nearly, but not quite.