Annotated Table of Contents: Miscellaneous 03

Humor. American Humor. Constance Rourke. Two types of American humor: the Yankee and the backwoodsman.

Speaking. How to Develop Self-Confidence and Influence People by Public Speaking. Dale Carnegie. Some interesting and practical points on successful public speaking.

 Sports. For the Glory. Ken Denlinger. The story of a Penn State collegiate football recruiting class. In telling the stories of these players, Ken Denlinger is telling the story of all football players in major college football programs.

Sports. Bill Campbell: Voice of Philadelphia Sports. Bill Campbell, a sportscaster, was as much a part of Philadelphia sports as booing.

Travel. The Innocents Abroad or the New Pilgrims’ Progress. Mark Twain. Twain looked at hallowed European landmarks from a fresh and humorous point of view without reverence for the past and poked fun at both American and European prejudices and manners. A very entertaining look at tourism.

Travel. Roughing It. Mark Twain. Twain records a journey in the 1800s from St. Louis across the plains to Nevada, a visit to the Mormons,  and life and adventures in Virginia City, San Francisco, and the Sandwich Islands. Twain describes pioneering in the West: riding a stage coach; the Pony Express; the Mormon Bible (“chloroform in print”); James Fenimore Cooper’s the “scholarly” Indians in The Last of the Mohicans; characters’ use of language; a landslide; a character who knows everyone he meets; the colorful idiomatic language of the West; lawyers; the belief that everything that happens is good; the missionaries who converted the natives of Hawaii to Christianity and made them permanently miserable; and Brigham Young and polygamy.