Rating: 
Summary: Once More With Feeling
Review: Can you imagine life without Henry Louis Mencken? I, for one, cannot and shudder to think of even one single day deprived of the Sage's coruscating wit, side-splitting humor, and vituperative angst. The joy and satisfaction gleaned from reading Mencken's essays can be likened to the appreciation expressed by an ailing patient, being adminstered a generous dose of morphine, to an understanding and avuncular physician. Mencken's serrated prose soothes the itching scalp brought on by an excess of sentimentality; assuages the burning ulcer brought on by a surfeit of political correctness; lances the boil exacerbated by the stupefying rhetoric gushing from the mouths of disingenuous and media-savvy politicians. In short, this volume of essays will act as a restorative agent on your enervated soul and bolster your mental stamina tenfold. However, please remember to use the Chrestomathy responsibly as repeated readings can result in massive cerebral hemorrhaging due to overstimulation and lack of sleep.
Rating:
Summary: Once More With Feeling
Review: Can you imagine life without Henry Louis Mencken? I, for one, cannot and shudder to think of even one single day deprived of the Sage's coruscating wit, side-splitting humor, and vituperative angst. The joy and satisfaction gleaned from reading Mencken's essays can be likened to the appreciation expressed by an ailing patient, being adminstered a generous dose of morphine, to an understanding and avuncular physician. Mencken's serrated prose soothes the itching scalp brought on by an excess of sentimentality; assuages the burning ulcer brought on by a surfeit of political correctness; lances the boil exacerbated by the stupefying rhetoric gushing from the mouths of disingenuous and media-savvy politicians. In short, this volume of essays will act as a restorative agent on your enervated soul and bolster your mental stamina tenfold. However, please remember to use the Chrestomathy responsibly as repeated readings can result in massive cerebral hemorrhaging due to overstimulation and lack of sleep.
Rating:
Summary: The "Baltimore Bad Boy" at his best.
Review: H.L. Mencken worked for newspapers for 50 years, living and working in Baltimore the entire time. His niche was criticism and commentary, at which he excelled. There is no one to match his wit and style. H.L.M. was not a reporter, he was a stylist: it's the way he said what he said that is important.This book is a collection of Mencken's writings, mostly from previous books he wrote: the "Prejudices" series, "In Defense of Women", "A Book of Burlesques", et al. Some of the offerings are from the magazines he edited: "American Mercury" and "Smart Set", with a few newspaper articles for good measure. The copyright listings go back as far as 1917. Mencken discusses everything from men and women, government, morals, religion, music and history, to odd fish, quackery, pedagogy, psychology and buffooneries. Listed under the latter rubric, one will find a work entitled "A Neglected Anniversary", which started the famous bathtub hoax, explained by the author in his notes, for those unfamiliar with the Great Man and his life and times. A second of Mencken's commentaries, which seems to have gained more fame than some of the others, is "The Sahara of the Bozart", page 184. The American South is H.L.M.'s subject here, thus: "Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity...that stupendous region of worn-out farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums...it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomic...." Ouch! One may not agree with his opinions, but one must acknowledge that he expresses them very well, and that reading his writings is great entertainment. H.L. Mencken is probably the greatest American writer of the 20th Century, if not of all time. Enjoy.
Rating:
Summary: The "Baltimore Bad Boy" at his best.
Review: H.L. Mencken worked for newspapers for 50 years, living and working in Baltimore the entire time. His niche was criticism and commentary, at which he excelled. There is no one to match his wit and style. H.L.M. was not a reporter, he was a stylist: it's the way he said what he said that is important. This book is a collection of Mencken's writings, mostly from previous books he wrote: the "Prejudices" series, "In Defense of Women", "A Book of Burlesques", et al. Some of the offerings are from the magazines he edited: "American Mercury" and "Smart Set", with a few newspaper articles for good measure. The copyright listings go back as far as 1917. Mencken discusses everything from men and women, government, morals, religion, music and history, to odd fish, quackery, pedagogy, psychology and buffooneries. Listed under the latter rubric, one will find a work entitled "A Neglected Anniversary", which started the famous bathtub hoax, explained by the author in his notes, for those unfamiliar with the Great Man and his life and times. A second of Mencken's commentaries, which seems to have gained more fame than some of the others, is "The Sahara of the Bozart", page 184. The American South is H.L.M.'s subject here, thus: "Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity...that stupendous region of worn-out farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums...it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomic...." Ouch! One may not agree with his opinions, but one must acknowledge that he expresses them very well, and that reading his writings is great entertainment. H.L. Mencken is probably the greatest American writer of the 20th Century, if not of all time. Enjoy.
Rating:
Summary: A great read
Review: I really like this book. Mencken's prose and unflinching attitude is like no other author I have read. I don't know if they used the middle finger in the early 1900s but if so, then HLM was its personification. If you were to tally his word usage in the book I believe "idiot", "imbecile", "buffoon", "moron" and "mountebank" would be near the top. This book contains one of my favorite essay and the single biggest reason to own this book, his piece on the critical process. It's only a 10 page essay but it's probably the most eloquent. For whatever reason he put it around page 450, but I would recommend reading it first. It puts a reader in the right frame of mind for reading Mencken's essays. He explains a worthwhile critic is not so much concerned with truth or detail. Instead a truly great critic takes the target of the criticism and uses it to develop his own original ideas. It separates those who would just be archivists with those who would be artists. Clearly, Mencken was not concerned with the former, he was concerned with art and he was an artist.
Rating:
Summary: We Need Mencken Back!
Review: In a field of political discourse dominated by folks making up facts and yelling at each other, one is left to pine for Mencken. A great antidote for political drowning this election year is this book.
His care for the language and strong personal views combine in this book. After you read it, answer this question: where can you find the kind and quality of this writing now? There had been a whole genre - political columnists - before. Finding this today is getting harder and harder. Independent thinkers willing to share their views without working an agenda of some sort cannot find work, it seems.
As in times past, the closest we might be able to get to this is in the realm of contemporary political satirists, like Jon Stewart. Well, if you don't mind hundred-year-old politics but miss the music of words, read this book.
Rating:
Summary: The best book ever written
Review: Perhaps I am biased. Mayhap I am gushing. I don't mind- I have read a good couple thousand books in my lifetime, and I have reviewed a few dozen for Amazon.com. Yet this is the one I keep coming back to read, year after year. As time goes by I find myself revising the scale of Mencken's achievement upwards and upwards, especially knowing that the only comparison is to other mere mortal writers. What makes this book brilliant is its terse structure- it is fragmented and in short pieces, and this produces his intense compact wit in wave after wave of the finest observations and thoughts to come out of mortal man since Tom Sawyer. A Mencken Chrestomathy utterly fails to do badly at every turn. If you have glanced at this book, and have even a tiny thought at not buying at least two copies, shoot yourself in the foot for punishment, then go buy a dozen copies and pass them out to your superior friends as rewards for their sagacity and charm and as a reward for their loyalty. But if you have little humanity and wish to punish a friend or make their lives more miserable, do not tell them of this book, and leave it right where it is. I give no book this high a regard. But I give this one my complete, unconditional support. If you have the means, I suggest buying a thousand copies and distributing it among the hungry of mind for the wonderful elixer of an effect Mencken has upon the mind. The only thing bad about this book is the covers are too close together.
Rating:
Summary: Any Mencken is 5 stars....
Review: Perhaps if read... 42 and Clinton, krc cpo?
The fullerene flicker of dimensional signal intensities from
antennas in reciprocal surveillance.
Theoretical problem... zum Beispiel, z.B., mitochonrial haberdashe
d captured adult stem cells...
The Iran Korean swivel, itch your calf for day, call it worship...
study the diaphragm breath circuit, apply, get cane someday.
Don't get a bad back leaning into your Piers A. Macroscope.
To save your people, and form the non-invective kernal
of mitochondrial solar storage devolvements in the plane
of realtiy.
Remember... whistle blowers bite back..
Oregon St. Letter to Michigan latest as admissable.
Google: Scots Law News
The opus of any writer purporting The American Language
is a study in reading, and the accelerant availble in
common text.
The next steam engine is essentially built in the same country.
Rating: 
Summary: A Good Introduction to Mencken
Review: Since Mencken was writing at the turn of the Century, some of these brief essays are a bit dated (duh!), but still well written and quite clever. His views on Religion and Government are quite thought provoking. This isn't the kind of book that you necessarily would want to read straight through at one sitting, but seems more appropriate for passing the odd half hour that you don't want to waste in front of the TV. A Good Libertarian book...
Rating:
Summary: A Good Introduction to Mencken
Review: Since Mencken was writing at the turn of the Century, some of these brief essays are a bit dated (duh!), but still well written and quite clever. His views on Religion and Government are quite thought provoking. This isn't the kind of book that you necessarily would want to read straight through at one sitting, but seems more appropriate for passing the odd half hour that you don't want to waste in front of the TV. A Good Libertarian book...
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