Twenty years ago, I made a brief study of the Acknowledgments sections of cook books. Even the great and otherwise restrained Elizabeth David could not resist thanking “countless” other cookery writers for their help in one book. And so does practically every other cookery writer. After “countless,” the next most frequent word in such acknowledgments is “secrets.” The author thanks the countless other cooks for sharing their secrets though, after this mass and repeated orgy of dissemination, “secrets” seems an odd word to use. Authors also thank their families too in hyperbolic terms and, do you know, not a single cookbook would have been possible without the Herculean labors of the typist.
The puzzle is why intelligent people in a rich, healthy America have so many “discontents.” Why do they hate their own, very good, society so much?
I thought I was the only person who had noticed this particular source of disgustingly effusive gratitude until I read Discontents. Paul Hollander has a whole, hilarious chapter on them. It’s a new and entirely happy world in which writing is something only possible through spouses who are unfailingly supportive and loving, students who deluge their professors with insights, children who have selflessly put up with neglect, and publishers and secretaries who have been angels. Paul Hollander is very funny and very cheerful, the very opposite of discontent. His book is a collection of previously published essays on intellectuals and Communism. Both are deeply depressing subjects, but Hollander,
