Lynch tells many amusing anecdotes - how Noah Webster tried but failed to drop the final e on determine and examine, how OK began as an in-joke among newspapermen, how George Carlin’s list of filthy words, a comic routine, became the standard for what was admissible on the public airwaves.
Lynch recognizes that grace, clarity, and precision of expression are paramount. His many well-chosen and entertaining examples support his conclusion that prescriptions and pedantry will always give way to change, and that we should stop fretting, relax, and embrace it.
THE AMERICAN LEONARDO: A Tale
of Obsession, Art and Money
By John Brewer
Oxford University, 336 pp., $24.95
Through the story of one painting, “La Belle Ferronniere,’’ purportedly by Leonardo da Vinci, Brewer traces the fascinating history of art collecting in America, and the complex and often conflicting values and forces behind the various practices for appraising, attributing, appreciating, and selling art.
In 1919 Harry Hahn and his French bride returned from Europe to his Midwestern home with a wedding gift - a portrait by da Vinci. The famed English art dealer and connoisseur Joseph Duveen, without ever having examined the painting, declared it a fake. In 1929, the Hahns sued him for “slander of title,’’ and, in the trial that followed, solid Midwestern values defeated European snobbery and expertise. Elegant, erudite, Duveen was forced to settle out of court for a large sum of money. But this was hardly the end of the story. Over the years, the painting has attracted supporters and detractors, intentionally and inadvertently exposing the cozy, corrupt world of art dealers, and the sharp practices of art experts. Through the rest of the century up to today, the painting has been considered a genuine da Vinci, a copy, a fake, the work of a real minor old master. It remains out of sight, its ownership as well as its value still in dispute.
LIVER: A Fictional Organ with a
Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes
By Will Self
Bloomsbury, 288 pp., $26.
