You may be wondering why anyone would write a book about car dealers. The car business is an industry of sameness- of lameness. It is an industry plagued by people who do and act the same way everyone else around them acts. It's an industry where local dealers are prompted by industry bigwigs to be the same, ordinary and average. With this in mind, we went on a hunt to find the innovators in one of the most ordinary and disliked industries. In this book, we reveal the results of that search and introduce you to the champions of an upcoming automotive renaissance. You'll discover who these big thinkers and change agents are and how they are turning an industry plagued by ill-will into one that is valued and appreciated by putting the focus on the customer, not the car.
The time period of the novel spans the life of Jewel Carpenter McLain (1900-1995) from the age of fourteen to a few months after her death. As a precocious child living in India, Jewel receives most of her education from an Indian scholar-tutor and from her parents library. Even at this early stage she already has an uncompromising aversion to violence. At nineteen, she leaves India for Cambridge to continue studying languages. She is diverted from her studies by an encounter with very poor children and devotes much of her time helping them and educating them. Malcolm McLain, who had met her in India convinces Jewel to marry him, to move with him to the United States, and to help him use his inherited wealth to help people in need. Jewel continues to help destitute people wherever she finds them for the rest of her life. A second story line concerns an American of Lebanese descent, Yussuf Aqami, an electrical engineer who marries Harriet Adnan, a Turkish-born musician. Shortly after their marriage, Yussuf becomes an international dealer in weapons. This distresses his wife, who, along with her artistic friends, has spent much of her time protesting the United Statess use of military force in international affairs. However, she feels bound to Yussuf both because of Islamic tradition and because she is pregnant. It takes another seventeen years for Harriet to leave Yussuf when he develops an hysterical fear of being assassinated. Yussuf finds refuge from his fear by losing himself in a large crowd of people, part of a growing international cult, who assemble to listen to a mysterious flute. A third story line involves an assortment of scientists: biochemists Dante Peroni and Sybil Sporn, and several others from various fields. Sybil meets Jewel McLain one day in Bombay, where Jewel tries to convince her to pursue particularly challenging research even though it may jeopardize her career by not producing immediate publications. Several years later, when Sybil decides to search for a genetic cause of violence, Jewel agrees to finance a small research institute for this purpose, and Dante joins Sybil in the enterprise. The research group is beset by a dilemma of how to distinguish violent people from the nonviolent. (A distracting example is a man with a lifelong devotion to nonviolence, who spends the final months of his life assassinating weapons merchants as a means of promoting peace in the world.) In the end, using the blood of prison inmates who are differentiated for their violent or nonviolent attributes by their wardens, the research group finds a correlation that suggests that they are on the road to finding the correct gene. A correlation, of course, may be meaningless. Todd Werben, a young black chemist, is very concerned about the possible abuses of their discovery if they should ever succeed. The cult of those who listen to a mysterious flute encompasses a growing portion of the world and touches the lives of almost everyone in the novel.
Manny Farber (1917–2008) was a unique figure among American movie critics. Champion of what he called "termite art" (focused, often eccentric virtuosity as opposed to "white elephant" monumentality), master of a one-of-a-kind prose style whose jazz-like phrasing and incandescent twists and turns made every review an adventure, he has long been revered by his peers. Susan Sontag called him "the liveliest, smartest, most original film critic this country ever produced"; for Peter Bogdanovich, he was "razor-sharp in his perceptions" and "never less than brilliant as a writer." Farber was an early discoverer of many filmmakers later acclaimed as American masters: Val Lewton, Preston Sturges, Samuel Fuller, Raoul Walsh, Anthony Mann. A prodigiously gifted painter himself, he brought to his writing an artist's eye for what was on the screen. Alert to any filmmaker, no matter how marginal or unsung, who was "doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it," he was uncompromising in his contempt for pretension and trendiness, for, as he put it, directors who "pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance." The excitement of his criticism, however, has less to do with his particular likes and dislikes than with the quality of attention he paid to each film as it unfolds, to the "chains of rapport and intimate knowledge" in its moment-to-moment reality. To transcribe that knowledge he created a prose that, in Robert Polito's words, allows for "oddities, muddles, crises, contradictions, dead ends, multiple alternatives, and divergent vistas." The result is critical essays that are themselves works of art. Farber on Film brings together this extraordinary body of work in its entirety for the first time, from his early and previously uncollected weekly reviews for The New Republic and The Nation to his brilliant later essays (some written in collaboration with his wife Patricia Patterson) on Godard, Fassbinder, Herzog, Scorsese, Altman, and others. Featuring an introduction by editor Robert Polito that examines in detail the stages of Farber's career and his enduring significance as writer and thinker, Farber on Film is a landmark volume that will be a classic in American criticism. From the Trade Paperback edition.
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