Out of Step: Notes from a Purple Decade

by Jonathan Yardley

Book Overview

FINE in FINE jacket 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394589106
• ISBN13: 9780394589107
• Release Date: February 1991
• Publisher: Villard Books
• Length: 263 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Still Pertinent And Durable

Yardley was, and probably still is, a book reviewer and columnist for the WASHINGTON POST. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1981. OUT OF STEP is made up of a selection of over sixty of the weekly columns Yardley wrote between 1981 and 1989. Although most of these segments relate to then current events, Yardley carefully chose ones dealing with "larger issues that transcend topicality." To paraphrase an old adage," The proof of that is in the reading." Although the events and/or people who inspired the columns may be long forgotten, the conclusions drawn by Yardley are pertinent and durable.I don't think that a better way could be found to whet the reader's appetite for the tasty tidbits found in this book than to discuss and quote from a few select columns.April 18, 1983: "Books That Comfort"Yardley takes as his starting point a letter to the editor from a reader who complained that GRAPES OF WRATH was required reading in her daughter's Northern Virginia High School. Her argument was that her daughter's love of reading was being destroyed by being forced to read such a dreary, depressing book as GRAPES OF WRATH and that it would be more appropriate to choose only books that uplift the spirit and gladden life. After a discussion in which he mentions a number of valid reasons for reading GRAPES OF WRATH including its social impact, Yardley comments that the letter writewr's criteria for selecting books would eliminate almost all of the world's great literature. For examples he mentions Shakespeare's Tragedies, most of Dickens' novels, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, The Greek Classics and on and on ad infinitum and would limit a student's exposure to reading to POLLYANNA, REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM, and PARSON WEEM'S LIFE OF GEORGE WASHINGTON,He concludes with, "A child raised on nothing except good news and 'comforting ideas' will become an adult almost certainly incapable of meeting life on its own tough terms."July 4, 1988: "The Age of Psychology"In this column, Yardley takes on both the "expert witness" brand of hired courtroom psychologists and the media psychologists who dispense advice on a moments notice. Calling much of this type of instant analysis "psychobabble," he goes on to state that, "Were there no psychobabble and no psychologists to spout it, Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey would go out of business overnight." He also comments that television newscasts would probably have to shut down if they were deprived of their five-second spots of instant in-depth analysis that "tells it like it is."The real pity of this is, he states, that in our exposure to psychobabble we lose sight of the good that a competent psychoanalyst can do, in an appropriate environment, for troubled individuals and families.These are but two of the sixty plus subjects that Yardley addresses. Each one is interesting, intelligent, and highly readable Yardley frequently risks being "out of step," not out of