The Greatest Men's Party on Earth: Inside the Bohemian Grove by Van der Zee, John - 1974-01-01

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974-01-01. Hardcover. Acceptable/Acceptable. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich [Published Date: 1974]. NOTE: Hardcover, 182 pp. Second printing. Acceptable in acceptable dust jacket. Black cloth covered boards have a 1/4" dent and some nicking to the cloth in the middle of the fore-edge of the front cover. Light overall scuffing and fading to edges of covers as well. Binding tight. Light spotting to top edge of text block. Pages lightly aged but otherwise unmarked with occasional light spotting. Dust jacket has a 1.5" circular chip along the fold of the front jacket flap and several other chips and tears and creasing to edges. Light to moderate overall scuffing, aging and soiling to jacket as well. NOT price clipped Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. Overall a good reading copy [from front jacket flap] The Bohemian Grove is a closely guarded redwood preserve a hundred miles or so north of San Francisco. There the Bohemian Club - one of the supremely exclusive men's clubs in the nation - holds an annual encampment that may be, because of its scale and the participants, the most remarkable tribal ritual ever celebrated by the human male. Herbert Hoover, a dedicated Bohemian but hardly (one imagines) a man much given to hyperbole, called it the greatest men's party on earth. What happens when throngs of the most powerful Americans - leaders in industry, finance, politics, and the professions - gather each July beneath the towering trees and luxuriously rough it for a frenetic fortnight? John van der Zee penetrated the sacred precincts in the guise of a waiter. From his personal observations, from conversations with members willing to talk, and from his delvings into the curious history of the club (it was founded, with the utmost informality, by a bunch of carefree newspapermen), he has made a highly entertaining book. Much of what he reveals is funny; some of it almost passes belief; none of it is exactly sinister. But the book's total effect - as we contemplate the superlatively successful American male chauvinist at play - is by implication at least a little disturbing.