“A book seemingly intended to sap the foundation of that morality which it is the duty of parents and all public instructors to inculcate in the minds of young people.”
Sir John Hawkins, Life of Samuel Johnson 1787
“I scarcely know a more corrupt work.”
Samuel Johnson, quoted in Memoirs, Hannah More 1780
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“Anybody that wants the presidency so much that he’ll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
“From the first pages of this novel to the last we are conscious that the author is straining for strangeness. He will say nothing simply. His paragraphs are so long and so involved that it is hard to remember who is talking or the subject which began the paragraph… We doubt the story just as we doubt the conclusion… We do not doubt the existence of decadence, but we do doubt that it is the most important or the most interesting feature in American life, or even Mississippi life.”
Boston Evening Transcript
“The final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“Despite Mr. Faulkner’s great gifts and deep sensitivity, what he is actually offering us is a flight from reality. It’s horrors and obscenities in no way contradict this, for many persons, tired of ordinary life, have been known to seek amusement courting nightmares.”
The Bookman
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“…the critic can hardly be blamed if some categorical imperative which persists in the human condition (even at this late date) compels him to put his book in a high place in an inferior category.”
New York Times Book Review
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“Our school system has been constructed by conservatives who were thinking much more in terms of fitting our rising generations into molds of traditional learning than in terms of training inventive and critical minds. From the point of view of society’s present needs, it is apparent that those old molds are cracking….”
Jean Piaget, Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child (1970)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged cognition/learning/understanding, philosophy/religion
“Any second rate English society novelist could have written this story better than F. Scott Fitzgerald though no one could have touched his best chapters. Is it laziness, indifference, a lack of standards, or imperfect education that results in this constant botching of the first rate by American novelists?”
Saturday Review of Literature
“…none of the characters in this book is made sufficiently measurable at the beginning to give to his later downhill course anything more than mildly pathetic interest.
William Troy, The Nation
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“Virtue has never been as respectable as money.”
Mark Twain
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
“The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.”
Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“The book is poorly written, full of repetitions, replete with borrowings from unbelievers, and spoiled by the author’s atheistic bias and his flimsy psychoanalytic borrowings.”
Catholic World
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
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