Books like In Defense Of Women

In the past, when I've heard someone claim "Satire is dead," I usually put up all these protestations, refutations, etc. I should have kept my mouth shut until I read Mencken. Haven't seen too much like this around lately: "Even prostitution, in the long run, may become a more or less respectable profession, as it was in the days of the Greeks. That quality will surely attach to it if ever it grows quite unnecessary; whatever is unnecessary is always respectable, for example, religion, fashionable clothing, and a knowledge of Latin grammar."He's just so often acute in his observations. You get this precise and cogent summation of a hypocrite, for example: "First he sees danger, then he sees difficulty, then he sees wrong."They should assign Mencken as vocabulary blasters to students preparing to assail the SAT. Here's just smattering of the words I'm now going to look up (and I did pretty well on my pre-college exams): manumitt, termagants, tatterdemalion, sklavemoral, brummagem, flummeries.... (Four of these six are being flagged by goodreads spellchecker, by the way.)Lastly, I want to point out that I read the 1922 edition, because I boast huge stones.