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Article: America's Homegrown Idea: Pragmatism and Its Progenitors.(Arts&Entertainment)(Review)
- Article from:
- The New York Observer (New York, NY)
- Article date:
- May 21, 2001
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 The New York Observer. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Byline: Adam Begley
The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, by Louis Menand. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 546 pages, $27.
There's a new book out about mauve, the color. Recently there was a history of the mirror. A book about longitude scaled the best-seller list last year. This is the trend: inflated trivia. The strategy behind these books-and they are legion-is to start small and let the topic grow until whatever modest item you began with (orchids, cod, paper clips) comes to seem both ubiquitous and oddly essential to Western civilization.
Louis Menand, a professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, ...