Sunday, January 12, 2014

Speeding ...

Are Americans working too hard, too fast, and too chaotically for our own good? Slate books editor Dan Kois was eager to find out when a review copy of Stephanie Brown’s Speed: Facing Our Addiction to Fast and Faster—and Overcoming Our Fear of Slowing Down landed on his desk. So he proposed a challenge. Could I read the entire book, write a review, send it to him for an edit, and complete the revisions within a four-hour window?

2 comments:

  1. Dan Kois -- author of the disgraceful "Eating Your Cultural Vegetables" -- is the most anti-intellectual figure writing about or editing books reviews in America today. Why more people aren't protesting his stupidity, his hubris, his venality, and his disrespect for the mind of the common reader is a mystery I'll never fathom.

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  2. "Harold Bloom’s claim to the New York Times that he could read at a rate of five hundred pages per hour.

    "Writer’s arse.

    "Spectacular exhibition! Right this way, ladies and gentlemen! See Professor Bloom read the 1961 corrected and reset Random House edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses in one hour and thirty-three minutes. Not one page stinted. Unforgettable!"

    -- David Markson, THIS IS NOT A NOVEL

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