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by Peter Novobatzky and Ammon Shea
(Harcourt Brace, 256 pages, $13)
Pissburnt, cretinized, anilingus, lickspigot, bedung, merdivore. The practicality of these words should be self-evident, yet, according to compilers Peter Novobatzky and Ammon Shea, they have sadly fallen out of common usage. But with luck, their comprehensive compendium of corrupt words will reintroduce readers to the buried treasures of our language.
Here are many useful words demanding resurrection: draffsack (a glutton's paunch), genicon (another person you fantasize about during sex), hygeiolatry (health fanaticism), plunderbund (a thieving ring of businessmen), circumstantiality (the inability to separate important and unimportant details while telling a story), and a new find for my dramatic criticism, klazomaniac (someone who compulsively shouts). There's also, lo and behold, an English version of schadenfreude--epicaricacy--thus making the German word redundant.
There are some drawbacks to Depraved and Insulting English. Though the authors supply a bibliography, it would have been more rewarding for wordwhores such as myself to have each word's source cited as well as some attempts at etymology. Gambrinous (fat with beer) is an excellent term, but how many readers would know it stems from King Gambrinus, Flanders' King Arthur and the patron saint of ale? And perhaps I run in different circles than the authors, but are bathetic, flagellant, smegma, hirsine, bedizen, effluvium, tribadism and bilious really considered rare? More's the pity for the tongue if true.
Cremaster is on the rise, if you will, thanks to artist Matthew Barney (it is the principal muscle that lifts the scrotum), but who knew that pica means a "depraved appetite; hunger for such nonfoods as ashes, clay, starch, chalk, and plaster"? Actually, it all sort of makes sense. Steffen Silvis
Blood of Victory
by Alan Furst
(Random House, 288 pages. $24.95)
Fourteen years ago, Alan Furst, then author of a few genre novels that even he wanted to forget, started writing thrillers set in the airless Europe of the 1930s and '40s. He began dispatching lugubrious trains across the Continent and depositing world-weary spies (aristocrats, almost always) in picturesque locations, there to smoke cigarettes, make love to beautiful women and kill Nazis. It's irresistible stuff, and it won Furst first cult support and now mainstream acclaim.
Unfortunately, Blood of Victory is not the most winning entry in this nascent canon. A rather wan tale of Romanian oil-field sabotage (cf. Eric Ambler's Background to Danger, a classic and an object of homage here), Blood turns previously forgivable (even lovable) conceits into annoying mannerisms. The hero is an exiled Russian poet, and perhaps this choice caused the author some writerly performance anxiety: He relies excessively on portentous and oddly placed, commas; he has fallen in love with italic type.
Furst's men of war always pack moody sensitivity along with their Gauloises and period-correct firearms. This time, though, the male lead spends so much time staring wistfully into bodies of water, Furst finally has to comment on the habit. Though his research and descriptions are as strong as ever, the action he unkennels in his scenic cities is less than compelling. By now, anyone familiar with Furst knows a little band of mismatched knights will scheme mightily against ze Germans--but not all will go according to plan! Those not yet acquainted with Furst's repetitive but alluring rhythms will do better with Kingdom of Shadows or The Polish Officer, two adventures that find our man in Europe in better form. Zach Dundas
out of the flames
by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone
(Broadway Books, 353 pages, $24.95)
Previous books by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone have chronicled the Connecticut couple's adventures in book collecting--meeting eccentric book dealers, sitting
in on rare-book auctions, puzzling over the exorbitant prices fetched by modern first editions. Charming reading for bibliophiles, but with an unmistakable whiff
of dilettantism.
Out of the Flames is a fresh departure for the Goldstones. It's an ambitious foray into serious historical scholarship that recounts the near-forgotten story of Michael Servetus, a Spanish physician and heretic who was ultimately burned at the stake--but not before leading church authorities on a merry chase through Europe and making one of the most important discoveries in the history of modern medicine.
Servetus' chief heresy was that he denied the existence of the Trinity as defined by the Catholic Church, but his fatal mistake was crossing spiritual swords with the Protestant orthodoxy of John Calvin. When Calvin realized he was losing the war of ideas with Servetus, he betrayed his rival to the authorities in 1553. After Servetus went to the stake, Calvin tried to eradicate his ideas by ordering Protestant leaders to burn every known copy of Servetus' most important work, the Christianismi Restitutio, significant not only for its biblical scholarship (which would lead to the establishment of Unitarianism) but also for its scientific description of blood circulation, a discovery that went unrecognized until William Harvey's experiments in 1628. Only three copies of this book survive, one of which the Goldstones trace back, ironically, to Calvin himself.
The Goldstones show how rivalries and in-fighting among Europe's royal families dictated the ups and downs of religious freedom during the Renaissance, and tell Servetus' story with an immediacy and ironic humor that make this book a delight to read. Matt Buckingham
WWeek 2015