Reviewed in Brief

A Carnival of Buncombe, by H. L. Mencken. Edited by Malcolm Moos. 370 pp. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. $4.50

“It has been, by God’s will, a very bitter campaign, which is to say, an unusually honest one,” said Mencken in 1928. In this year’s very sugary, which is to say, unusually dishonest campaign, when not only the candidates but most of the commentators distinguished themselves by a glassy, standard-brand nicety, it would have been tonic if some newspaper—in place of its syndicated pundits—had reprinted these 69 diatribes which Mencken discharged from 1920 to 1926. (After that, he gave up: government by “milch cow with 125,000,000 teats” had become the permanent will of the pee-pul.) It is not only that his remarks are shrewd, hot, arrogant, undissembling, and very funny. They also amount to the last voice in American newspapers which dared unapologetically prefer the first-rate, the exceptional, to the mediocre.

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Roger Becket

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A Carnival of Buncombe, by H. L. Mencken. Edited by Malcolm Moos. 370 pp. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. $4.50

“It has been, by God’s will, a very bitter campaign, which is to say, an unusually honest one,” said Mencken in 1928. In this year’s very sugary, which is to say, unusually dishonest campaign, when not only the candidates but most of the commentators distinguished themselves by a glassy, standard-brand nicety, it would have been tonic if some newspaper—in place of its syndicated pundits—had reprinted these 69 diatribes which Mencken discharged from 1920 to 1926. (After that, he gave up: government by “milch cow with 125,000,000 teats” had become the permanent will of the pee-pul.) It is not only that his remarks are shrewd, hot, arrogant, undissembling, and very funny. They also amount to the last voice in American newspapers which dared unapologetically prefer the first-rate, the exceptional, to the mediocre.