Notebooks of a Dilettante

New York: The Macmillan Company, 1970. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Good/Good. [12], 240, [4] pages. Inscribed by author on fep. Paperclip impression and some staining on several pages. DJ has some wear, soiling, edge tears and chips. Book covers and inside of DJ have some wear and soiling/staining. The DJ states that this describes the 'encounters and confrontations of a U.S. immigrant in America." Leopold Tyrmand (May 16, 1920 in Warsaw, Poland - March 19, 1985) was a popular Polish-Jewish novelist, writer and editor. Tyrmand emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1966. He served as editor of an anti-communist monthly Chronicles of Culture with John A. Howard. Leopold Tyrmand (May 16, 1920 in Warsaw, Poland - March 19, 1985) was a popular Polish-Jewish novelist, writer and editor. Tyrmand emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1966, and five years later married an American, Mary Ellen Fox. In the United States, Tyrmand lived in New York City and New Canaan, Connecticut, until 1976, and regularly published essays in American periodicals such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Commentary and the The American Scholar. He became the co-founder and vice-president of the Rockford Institute, a conservative foundation critical of American publishing values and their apparent bias toward liberal writers. He served as editor of Chronicles of Culture, an anti-communist journal. His books include Kultura Essays, Explorations in Freedom, Notebooks of a Dilettante, On the Border of Jazz and Seven Long Voyages. Derived from a Kirkus review: These pieces which may run from a sentence to several pages have appeared in part in The New Yorker and the New Leader. They're by a Polish-born, about-to-be-American journalist often given to impromptu instant generalizations and contrasting the cultivated European vs. the commercialized American. Beginning, like de Tocqueville, with marginal comments on the physical scene here, he leads-on to greater things: social (nudity or pornography), political (manifestations of the racial/radical splits and mouthpieces Mao, Marcuse land McLuhan), intellectual, et al... On the whole Mr. Tyrmand returns to the vested values of tradition and maturity but also upholds dilettantism (impartiality... ""Isn't it more honorable not to know for sure than to know too much and too well?"") And he also upholds American society as ""the only one that scores some points."" A humanistic, non-doctrinaire, catchy commentary to be read with a cocked eyebrow and that prominent social feature, the smile.