BOOK REVIEW: 2009 – The Best American Travel Writing, Simon Winchester, Editor.

The 25 collected travel tales cover the world in one sense, but writers in quite another. It is not about countries. It is about individuals and cultures, and how adventuresome travelers react to social circumstances unlike their own; and the obverse, how others react to visitors from other places.

The Forward, by Jason Wilson, and the Introduction, by Winchester, are not to be skipped. Both define the nature of travel writing. It involves the awareness that geography is much more than the names of countries and capital cities. It’s about people living in other places, and their adaptations to both the physical and political environments of those places.

Less than 70 percent of America’s children can find France on a world map. Test yourself with a blank world map to fill in country names; or a blank map of the United States and Canada for states and provinces.

Ironically, American travel writing is among the best and most widely distributed in the world. And if it were matched by energetic travel reading, US citizens might become more aware of world events and other cultures. Winchester’s selections are a great start.

RAS (11/30/09)

BOOK REVIEW: Butt Rot & Bottom Gas; A Glossary of Tragically Misunderstood Words, Eric Groves, Sr., 2007.

Some words sound obscene but are not. For example, Groves had his collection of documentary photographs confiscated by US Customs because they were labeled “great tits.” Birdwatchers know them as European and Asian songbirds. Some corporate e-mail filters cut delivery on a few rather innocuous words as well as the more nasty ones known as slang or vulgarism, but most of the single words and/or expressions in this glossary seem at least PG rated. Use British spelling, add an ‘h’ between the ‘s’ and ‘o’ of “arsole” (an organic chemical compound) and this fairly common colloquial expression denoting stupidity might be filtered.

Most of the expressions in this short, small 112 page book would require at least an imaginative mind set to use them as euphemistic sex terms, but they do lend themselves easily to that frame of mind. It is surprising that some of the commonly used short word sex substitutes do not appear: frig (slang) for the more vulgar version for which there is an entire book – The F Word, Second Edition, Edited by Jesse Sheidlower, 1999, (Random House). Upsetting? Think of the number of words that rhyme with it!

When was the last time ‘niggardly’ appeared in print because of its mistaken association with dark skinned people? Or ‘fagot’ ( bundle of small sticks) when the ‘g’ is doubled? Irony that most heterosexuals have stopped using the word ‘gay’ since homosexuals now use it to describe their sexual preference.

Butt Rot & Bottom Gas makes for an eye-catching desk top conversation piece, but for all of those words kids hear and want parents to answer honestly about, a large uncensored dictionary will be necessary, however kids with good dictionaries might be in a better situation to answer parent questions!

RAS (11/30/09)

BOOK REVIEW: Modern Liberty and The Limits of Government, Charles Fried, 2007.

According to popular Christian myths, Adam was the first person on the earth, and thus the first and only person who had total freedom and liberty to act as he wished. Then along came Eve.

Suppose it had been the other way around. Eve came first, Adam second; and it was Adam who most often said, “Not tonight, I have a headache.” Not only did Adam and Eve have different perspectives on what the rules should be, but their God creator had a few thoughts of his own.

As the population increased, some presumed and/or elected leaders interpreted common sense rules about useful behavior. Philosophy began. Other presumed leaders, a priestly class, more adamant about the rules, tightened them. Religion began.

Charles Fried’s Modern Liberty considers not only individual liberty, but equal rights for divergent groups of people within a community. He examines the idea of free speech in varying social contexts? And perhaps, more importantly, who or what determines the amount of liberty an individual can enjoy, the rights of that individual vis-à-vis the rights of others, and can those rights be presumed to be equal?

Very often one person’s liberty is counterpoised to another person’s vision of some abstract good. Religious revelations from a God to an individual may offer a fair set of moral rules for communal living, but the commentary by others who reinterpret those rules often ends up restricting an individual’s liberty without just cause. This happens when an individual’s choices are restricted in some way under the threat of coercive or punitive action against them.

One can always change religions in a democracy, but what happens where a national government
is a theocratic state where non-believers are persecuted in one way or another by a minority? Fried asks “Who Imposes on whom?”

Fried explores in considerable detail of the need for both physical and mental space in which to express one’s individual liberty, and how the rights of one individual may or may not be perceived to interfere with the liberty of someone else. By contract rights can be bought or sold. But, when those rights are bought and sold under duress, who or what will protect the victim of that coercion?

Enter government and the rule of law; however, there is little to keep the government from reshuffling the deck when equitability ceases to flavor the power elite. Enter liberty of the mind.

Fried extends the discussion. Freedom of the mind, the liberty to speak and express thoughts requires some element of physical space and material possession to do so. Governments can and do dash this liberty by curtailing publishers, broadcasters, and individual speakers from the facilities needed to reach their respective audience, but the consensus of the governed is, or should be, that governments protect these liberties. It may very well be that governments are not the most effective engine of tyranny over people’s lives.

Cited in Modern Liberty is Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments, Oxford University Press (1974) where the tyranny of a parent over a son’s efforts to free his own mind is explored. Finally, as Fried puts it, one also has to “struggle with the inertia of one’s own mind.”

RAS (11/30/09)

BOOK REVIEW:

The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester, 1998. It is not only an interesting account of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, but carries with it the story of George Merrett’s accidental murder on February 17, 1872, by William Chester Minor in Victorian London’s crime-ridden Lambeth Marsh. Minor was sentenced to life, and after his interment in April 1872, was known as Broadmoor File Number 742.

Why Minor murdered Merrett is covered in Winchester’s exploration of Minor’s history as a child born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and later as a US Army surgeon during the Civil War. Minor’s brief time spent at the Wilderness Battle in Virginia during General Grant’s attempt to crush the Confederate forces of Robert E. Lee in Northern Virginia didn’t go so well, and while it may have tipped the scales of Minor’s descent from sanity, there is some reason to question the events of his earlier life.

James Augustus Henry Murray, the second primary figure in the OED’s origin, was born in 1837, Harwick, Scotland, a Teviot River valley town; and left school at 14 as did most poor children of the British Isles. Precocious, with a love of reading, an interest in just about everything, and more than just a flair for languages, by 15 he had a working knowledge of French, Italian, German, and Greek.

James married Maggie Scott when he was 24. Two years later Anna was born, but died in fancy. When Maggie got ill shortly after Anna’s death, the couple was forced by economic circumstances to move to move to Peckham (near London) where Murray worked for the Chartered Bank of India. It looked like the end of his intellectual pursuit, however, two years later married Ada Ruthven, far more his social and intellectual equal, a point from which he rose to be known worldwide as one of its greatest philologists.

While other dictionaries had been conceived and printed, none attempted the scope of OED. Winchester writes well of its conception, the problems associated with development, financing, and eventual printing of the current 20 volume tome.

Just how did Murray and Minor meet in 1880? There are two versions of the story, one more romantic than realistic. Both are told.

Minor’s condition declined as he aged. In 1910, Winston Churchill sighed for his discharge from Broadmoor, and return to the United States for continued confinement at St. Elizabeth’s Federal Hospital in Washington, DC, (Then known only as the Government Hospital for the Insane).
James Murray passed away on July 26, 1915, before the completion of the OED. In 1919, William Minor was transferred to hospital for the elderly insane in Hartford, CT, known as The Retreat. He passed away on March 26, 1920.