Conscientious Objections, by Neil Postman (Vintage, $10...

March 29, 1992|By Clarence Petersen.

Conscientious Objections, by Neil Postman (Vintage, $10). Postman, who chairs the Department of Communication Arts at New York University, is as readable, and funny, as columnist Russell Baker, whom he admires. In this collection of essays, he says no to some hallowed assumptions about technology, language and education. His piece called ``The Educationist as Painkiller`` is most provocative, arguing that schools like Yale that do not teach education, seeing it as a trivial study, have it backward. Many of the history`s most esteemed philosophers were educationists, among them Confucius, Plato, Erasmus, Locke, Rousseau, Milton, William James and John Dewey. What`s more, Postman says, ``All professors are ignorant, but not all ignorances are of equal importance. And there is nothing worse than ignorance on the subject of education. . . .`` He suggests that the best approach is for educationists to abandon their ``vague, seemingly arrogant, and ultimately futile attempts to make children intelligent, and concentrate on helping them avoid being stupid.``

- - -

Beating the Dow: A High-Return, Low-Risk Method for Investing in the Dow Jones Industrial Stocks With as Little as $5,000, by Michael O`Higgins, with John Downs (HarperPerennial, $10). The reason most people don`t know how to invest profitably, according to O`Higgins, is that they make a mountain of complexity out of a molehill of choices. To make his readable long story short, he advises investing against the grain. Buy low when others are scrambling to sell in reaction to such blips as The Exxon Valdez`s running around and spilling oil. That`s a blip? It seems so. Exxon`s stock dropped 7 percent on that news but quickly rebounded. Similarly, Texaco`s stock plunged 28 percent to $27 a share when the company was ordered to pay Pennzoil a $10.3 billion judgment in 1987. Two years later Texaco stock was selling for $60, an all-time high. The lessons are these: Such companies, says O`Higgins, have a history of raw staying power; the investing public invariably overreacts to bad news; and the huge institutional investors who dominate the market and cause its volatile swings make it easier for the smaller investor to make hay.

- - -

Sweet Water Ranch, by Geoffrey Norman (Dell, $4.95). Norman`s protagonist, Morgan Hunt, an ex-con pardoned for an unjust murder rap is, like John D. MacDonald`s Travis McGee, a knight in slightly tarnished armor. Here Hunt is looking for an 11-year-old boy named Luther who has run away from a ranch for abused, neglected kids run by Big John Fearson, an ex-football star. As the search develops, the finger of guilt points to Big John himself, but our man Hunt stays the course through deadly, dirty secrets, murder and revenge.

- - -

The Body Snatchers, Stiffs and Other Ghoulish Delights, by Frederick Drimmer (Citadel, $12.) ``All of this book,`` writes Drimmer, previously the author of ``Very Special People,`` ``is about dead bodies and most of it is about stolen ones.`` Steve Allen once said that only a healthy mind can enjoy sick humor, and there is something intrinsically funny, for example, in the story of Elmer J. Curdy, an Oklahoma outlaw and murderer who was hanged by a posse in 1911 but whose body was found hanging in the Laugh-the-Dark Funhouse in Long Beach, Calif., during the filming of ``The Six Million Dollar Man.``

It was quite a mystery how he got there, at first, but the investigation showed that Curdy`s body in the many years since his death had done a lot more traveling than Curdy ever did.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1992-03-29/entertainment/9201280989_1_investing-body-snatchers-geoffrey-norman
articles.chicagotribune.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-51
44149
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:HQHDKR6EIQ4X6EV74AZZQFDQVDDT5TRE
<urn:uuid:9a3a0462-1f7c-46fe-a569-c62d2f147e99>
2017-12-17T12:53:57Z
151.101.32.204
text/html
sha1:64S65EYFPPHCB5V7JKINLVXLNOXUIHWR
<urn:uuid:b920cb9c-faec-416d-8275-829c98ab5f72>
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1992-03-29/entertainment/9201280989_1_investing-body-snatchers-geoffrey-norman
response
<urn:uuid:44a3cbe1-7d39-4e14-92bb-e10836f86843>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-151-110-145.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-51
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for December 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf