The Lunacy Boom
About this book
Dust jacket blurb: "Today in America the outlandish becomes routine overnight, and after that nobody gives it a second thought," says William Zinsser in his introduction to The Lunacy Boom, and who should know better? Hardly anybody writing in the outlandish America of 1970. The author is a certified expert on the absurdities that face anyone who is simply trying to get through the day, as readers of Life will testify. They turn to a Zinsser column because he usually cloaks his serious point in humor, thereby saving his own sanity (he thinks) -- and theirs (he hopes).Here William Zinsser takes an acute and often hilarious look at such bizarre but daily phenomena as the new profanity in women, the new pornography in the arts, the new pretentiousness in ecology, and much else that is new and unsettling, such as drive-in funeral parlors for busy mourners. Here, too, are lampoons on the zip code and the electronic lawn mower (it cuts the grass while you play golf), the chickenfurter and the atomic test (Gee, it didn't cause an earthquake after all), the annual riot on the campus and the annual report of the corporation.Altogether, a twenty-nine-chapter tour of the new and bewildering America, including three chapters in which the author pays his affectionate respect to people who work has kept him cheered up: circus clowns, S.J. Perelman, and Chic Young, the creator of Blondie.And did you know that Walt Disney was a secret hippie?