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Prejudices

H. L. Mencken

1919252 pagesabout 4–6 hours
1919
first published
  • 1958Vintage Books · 258 pages · ENGISBN 9780394700588
  • 1977Octagon Books · 307 pages · ENGISBN 9780374955786
  • 1996The Johns Hopkins University Press · 258 pages · ENGISBN 9780801853418
  • 2006The Johns Hopkins University Press · 288 pages · ENGISBN 9780801885358
  • 2006Kessinger Publishing, LLC · 332 pages · ENGISBN 9781428613812
  • 2005Kessinger Publishing · 254 pages · ENGISBN 9781417903474
  • 2006Kessinger Publishing · 252 pages · ENGISBN 9781425496944
  • 2002Ross & Perry, · 256 pages · ENGISBN 9781932080148

Mencken, with his acerbic wit and tongue planted permanently near if not in cheek, laments a world where some feel that all original criticism has been done. New ideas are old ideas with new vocabularies. The things we choose to let offend us today are really the same as those in the past wearing shoes with platform souls just to seem a bit more ominous. With this hopeless situation, it becomes the job of pseudo-scholar to abandon criticism or carnal evils and move on to criticizing the criticism itself. Surely we, being more enlightened, more intelligent and more alive (always a key to proving your superiority to those before your time) can provide a better analysis of what is wrong with everything and right with nothing. I just dashed this off quickly one evening in an effort to snag others to read and evaluate. Feel free to liberally edit or delete my description. Since we have been born of immaculate perception, free from the sin of bias, it is our duty to point out for our contemporaries and our posterity what is truly "right" and what is--well, maybe "less right", for in our relativistic culture there is not wrong; 2 + 2 may equal 5 or even 3 from a point of view superior to our own. Find yourself in these pages. Live life in the third person and begin to recognize how each of us is slave to the history we've studied and lived, servant to our education and personal experience.

How it reads

ComplexityLayered
CommitmentQuick escape

When and where

Reading situationCommuteWaiting
ThemesClass
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