If table talk at dinner has fallen flat or you've forgotten most of your American history, read this lively treatment of the development of American English.
No, really.
Amusing anecdotes abound, written with the understated humor familiar to readers of the expatriate American author's previous travel and language books. Topics range from revolution, invention and immigration to shopping, sex and the space age.
Learn, for example, that the 10-gallon hat gets its name from galón, Spanish for the braid with which it was decorated, and that, after the first cafeteria opened in 1890s Chicago (the term was influenced by Cuban Spanish), the nation was flooded with such places as drugeterias, shaveterias and bobaterias—the last being a place to have your hair bobbed.
Bryson shows how Americans, never comfortable with anything too complicated, are unsurpassed in making practical use of foreign scientific and technological breakthroughs, reflecting the country's essential "pragmatism" (a word coined by William James in 1863).
The book loses steam near the end because too often Bryson mentions new words without explaining their origins. He also makes mistakes. Acoma, for instance, considered as a possible name for New Mexico, is not a made-up word but the name of what is thought to be the oldest continually inhabited settlement in North America. Nor was Jack Benny's original name John Kebelsky but rather Benjamin Kubelsky. But this book is no lemon—a term inspired by the losing symbols on early 20th-century slot machines—it's a peach! (Morrow, $23)
by Tony Schwartz
When Tony Schwartz finished writing The Art of the Deal with Donald Trump in 1987, he wondered why his life felt suddenly empty. His career was in high gear. He was financially secure, happily married and in good health. Yet something was missing. Who am I, he wondered, and why am I here? His search for the answers—detailed in What Really Matters—is an absorbing update on the timeless quest for enlightenment.
Schwartz, 42, focused on men and women whose ideas and practices convinced him that a "more meaningful life is within reach." He met Baba Ram Dass, the ex-Harvard professor who abandoned drug experiments in the 1960s to study yoga in India. He modified his alpha and theta brain waves at the Menninger Clinic in order to improve his concentration. He played tennis in Florida with Jim Loehr, sports psychologist, who taught him the value of relaxation between points. He developed the visual side of his brain with drawing instructor Betty Edwards. He cured his back pain by unleashing repressed anger and studied levels of consciousness unfamiliar to most people.
If the self-improvement field is ripe for ridicule, What Really Matters is far from laughable. The programs and philosophies that Schwartz has investigated are all the more credible and fascinating for the people behind them. The journey, however, is not without its pitfalls. At times Schwartz becomes dangerously self-absorbed, at one point analyzing a series of dreams about his grandparents with painstaking thoroughness, and his less-than-profound conclusion—"the point is to be real"—will disappoint anyone looking for a definitive answer. (Schwartz continues his own search today through psychotherapy.) But if the adage is true—that the journey is more important than the destination—then What Really Matters is a first step worth taking. (Bantam, $23.95)
by A.S. Byatt
In this exquisite triptych, three sensitive middle-aged women, despite their English mastery at repressing emotion, all suffer a shock to the nervous system. A university classicist, drawn to a hair salon by a reproduction of Henri Matisse's Rosy Nude hanging above the coat rack, gets a bad cut—which triggers a rage against the loss of her chestnut mane and the ebbing of her beauty. A design editor loses, in the most unexpected way, the cleaning woman on whom she desperately depends to hold her household together. An art professor, lunching with an esteemed male colleague charged with sexual harassment, uncovers a painful bond between the accuser and the accused.
Byatt (whose best-selling novel Possession won Britain's Booker Prize in 1990) is working with a rather precious conceit—each story is inspired by a Matisse painting, which serves as a portal into the life she chronicles. Yet Byatt is never flashy or facile. Despite its scant 134 pages, Stories is richly drawn and touches upon things that matter to people: thwarted dreams and desires; loneliness and the longing to connect; the restorative power of kindness; the pleasures of flesh, color and creation. One of Byatt's artists asks, "Why bother, why make representations of anything at all?" The author has given us the answer: In the hands of a master, truth and beauty lie in the shadows and light. (Random House, $17)
by James W. Hall
Gone Wild is an exotic departure for thriller-writer Hall, who leaves the asphalt jungles of South Florida for the real thing in Borneo. Hall's hero is animal activist Allison Farleigh, who has brought her two grown daughters to Indonesia to take part in the annual orangutan census. But the anticipated idyll turns into a nightmare when Winslow, Allison's oldest, is killed by poachers. Then Allison learns the bullet was meant for her.
Gone Wild follows Allison's furious efforts to find her daughter's killers. We are plunged into a world where endangered species are brutally and illegally harvested and sold for big bucks to fat-cat collectors. We also meet two of the more engaging psychopaths in recent crime fiction—Orlon and Rayon White. (Orlon, who is "smooth as an ice cube," shaves his body, even plucks his brows and lashes, so "every tickle of air" gives him a rush.)
The ending of Gone Wild is not up to Hall's usual standard. But you don't read Hall for his endings—you read him for the prose that gets you there. Take the passage in which Allison hides in a cave already claimed by a python: "The snake was surprisingly gentle, felt like warm water rising around her. For an instant everything became exquisitely vivid. The smell of the damp cave, the velvety embrace of the snake, the rasp of its body against her flesh, her slow breath entering and leaving her body...." Exquisitely vivid, indeed. (Delacorte, $21.95)
by Curtis Gathje
A beautiful young woman is murdered by an unknown assailant. The only witness is her dog, but he's not talking. The tabloids go wild, splashing glam photos of the deceased across their front pages and rehashing every lurid detail. Suspects, witnesses, even members of the victims' families all vie for the best cash deals to tell their side of the story.
Sound familiar? Wrong! Nicole and O.J. weren't even born when this true crime was going down in 1937. In Curtis Gathje's retelling of this celebrated Manhattan murder, the victim is Veronica "Ronnie" Gedeon, part-time model for magazines like Inside Detective and full-time player on the seedier fringes of café society. Suspects, ultimately exonerated, include her father and the author's uncle, Stephen Butter, who years later shared the story with Gathje. Eventually, Robert Irwin, an unemployed sculptor was charged with the murders and sentenced to 139 years in Sing-Sing prison.
Gathje's careful reconstruction of the crime, complete with reproductions of newspaper headlines and photos, paints a vivid picture of '30s American journalism and reminds us that while crime reporting is more sophisticated today, it has long had a grip on our imaginations. (Donald I. Fine, $19.95)
by Maryanne Vollers
As he climbed out of his car on a soggy June night in 1963, NAACP activist Medgar Evers was slain by a rifle shot in the back. The gunman had fired from behind a bush in a vacant lot across the street from the Evers house in Jackson, Miss. During the years that followed, all-white juries twice failed to convict Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist who had bragged to acquaintances about the killing. Beckwith later had the audacity to run for lieutenant governor using the unofficial campaign slogan "Elect Byron De La Beckwith—He's a Straight Shooter."
In her riveting account of Evers's murder and the 30-year crusade to bring his killer to justice, freelance journalist Vollers chronicles the social change that transformed the Deep South from a place where blacks could not vote and lynchings went unpunished to one where laws apply equally to all citizens.
Vollers excels at recounting the dogged efforts of state prosecutors, working with Evers's widow, Myrlie, the newly elected chairperson of the NAACP, to bring about Beckwith's third trial Fortunately this is a story with a just ending. In February 1994, Beckwith was convicted of Evers's murder. It took a racially mixed jury less than 7 hours to reach its verdict. (Little Brown, $24.95)"
- Contributors:
- Elaine Kahn,
- Thomas Curwen,
- Paula Chin,
- William Plummer,
- Nancy Matsumoto,
- Mark Bautz.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
