edited by Clarence Major, Penguin, 548 pages, $14.95 soft cover . CODE: PEN-3
Clarence Major, a novelist and poet, published his original Dictionary of Afro-American Slang in 1970; the new volume, three times as long, jumps with every kind of speech invention—funny, poetic, profane—from the 1600s ( juke ) to the 1990s ( banda ). No solemn theory of black’English is offered or needed; the book simply reveals one of the richest sides of the American language in action over three centuries.
by Margaretta Barton Colt, Orion Books, 441 pages, $35.00 . CODE: RAN-18
Drawing on the memoirs, diaries, and letters of some twenty of her forebears—the Barton-Jones family of Winchester and Frederick County, Virginia—Margaretta Barton Colt has pieced together an astonishingly vivid account of one family’s experience of the Civil War. Her relatives keep providing exactly the fresh, specific, and articulate expression a writer hopes for.
by Robert David Thomas, Knopf, 351 pages, $27.50 . CODE: RAN-17
Most people know pretty much how they feel about Christian Science, and this major biography of its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, doesn’t seek so much to diminish or elevate as to simply follow her life from a psychological viewpoint. The historian Robert David Thomas has spent the last fifteen years tracing Eddy’s rise from sickly child to mother of a worldwide faith; for much of that time he has labored in the guarded stacks of the Mother Church, which makes his the most complete portrait of Eddy and her followers by an outsider.
To be a real New Yorker—an especially important goal for those of us who were neither born nor raised here—is to remain cool in the presence of celebrities. The Upper West Side, where I live, is peppered with them, mostly because its rents were once low and Broadway, Lincoln Center, and the network studios are all only minutes away. One is careful not to acknowledge the presence of the Broadway star squeezing melons at the produce store, the anchorman picking up his morning paper, the movie stars nuzzling at the next table, the diva buying fish.
Here’s what your eighty-five hundred dollars bought from the Duesenberg factory in 1930: a Model J chassis with a wheelbase of 153.3 inches—the longest production car ever made in this country—a cast-aluminum firewall, and a 420-cubic-inch engine whose 265 horsepower more than doubled what any other American automaker of the day had to offer. This machinery went to a coachbuilder (who could add as much as twenty thousand dollars to the bill), and the result was a creature of such unsurpassed power and swank that it gave a new superlative to the language. Inside, Brock Yates tells the story of the supreme American automobile.
One is inclined to fantasize about driving a legend like the SJ Duesenberg, but it’s worth remembering that Duesenbergs are huge, multiton machines bereft of such modern niceties as power steering, power brakes, or a sophisticated suspension. Their engines, while powerful, rely on an abundance of cubic inches, aided by a centrifugal supercharger that supplies maximum power only at peak revs. So the SJ is hardly a stoplight rabbit or a particularly nimble cat on twisty sections of road.
Doozy.
As in “It’s a Duesy.” As in Duesenberg. As in power and speed and audacious size and spellbinding beauty. As in engineering, breeding, and bloodline that place it at the very pinnacle of automotive achievement, beside such icons as Rolls-Royce, Mercedes-Benz, and Bugatti and qualify it, hands down, as the greatest car ever produced in America. Duesenberg. As in the only automobile ever to enter the language as a superlative noun in the lexicon of slang.
My father, David Davidson, wrote about serving as a journalist attached to the U.S. Army in immediate postwar Germany, publishing a well-received novel, The Steeper Cliff , in 1947 and a memoir in American Heritage (June 1982). That time in Germany always remained fresh in his mind, and not long before he died in 1985, he committed to paper this recollection of the Nuremberg trials.
—C.D.
It was not only Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, the number-two man of the Thousand-Year Reich and Hitler’s own onetime choice for his successor, that I refrained from assassinating on a leaden December day. I also had in my sights—potential sights—Hess, Streicher, Rosenberg, Frank, Speer, von Schirach, et cetera. In short, the whole Nazi top command, except for those who had escaped the Nuremberg trials by suicide and Martin Bormann, who was tried in absentia .