AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW最新文献

• The Last Dictionary
• Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio)

dictionary, n. [c. 1480–] 1.a. A book which explains or translates, usually in alphabetical order, the words of a language or languages (or of a particular category of vocabulary), giving for each word its typical spelling, an explanation of its meaning or meanings, and often other information, such as pronunciation, etymology, synonyms, equivalents in other languages, and illustrative examples. Also (from the late 20th cent.): an electronic resource performing this function. Cf. lexicon n., wordbook n.

—Oxford English Dictionary (online)

last dictionary, n. [2024–] The last book that explained or translated, usually in alphabetical order, the words of a language or languages (or of a particular category of vocabulary), and gave for each word its typical spelling, an explanation of its meaning or meanings, and often other information, such as pronunciation, etymology, synonyms, equivalents in other languages, and illustrative examples. Replaced in the 21st century by an electronic resource performing this function. Cf. dictionary n.

—a future addition to the Oxford English Dictionary (online)

There is a dictionary for everything—except every word in the English language.

For some, the lexicographical maniacs, such a dictionary is the Holy Grail of lexicography. They dream of a space where the entirety of the English language is accessible through a dictionary the likes of which the world has never seen. It is a dictionary with an entry for every word that has ever been used by anyone in the English language. This includes not only formal and informal writing from books to blogs but also any and all verbal acts from music to marketing. Its principle of inclusion is that no word used in the English language will be excluded from it. In short, this very long dictionary would be a dictionary without gatekeepers who agonize over what words should be included and excluded. [End Page ix]

For others, however, this dream amounts to a complete deconstruction of the role of the dictionary in lexicography. Dictionaries are about gatekeepers. These gatekeepers are lexicographers who determine whether a word should be in the dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), for example, has had upwards of eighty lexicographers working on its forthcoming third edition. A large part of their job is to determine what words need to be added to this dictionary. It is a task these lexicographers take very seriously. As evidence of the gravitas of this decision, consider that it can take up to five years to add a new word to the OED.

"Y

• An Old Poem That Tells You How to Have Beautiful Children
• Anthony Madrid (bio)

All right, you never heard of this one. And I don't blame you. It's called Callipædia, or the Art of Getting Beautiful Children ("Getting" as in begetting.)

Originally written in Latin by a French doctor, Claude Quillet, and published in 1655. Translated into English many times, I'm told. It had a certain popularity, I'm told. But today? Utterly forgotten.

Only reason I know about it is 'cuz of Nicholas Rowe. He's fairly forgotten as well, but he was a big deal, three hundred years ago. Poet Laureate of Great Britain. Author of several plays that held the stage for years after his death. Translator of Lucan's Pharsalia, Bruyère's Characters, Boileau's Lutrin. Writer of the first biography of Shakespeare. Important early editor of Shakespeare.

Also, you know how occasionally a womanizer will be called a "Lothario"? That's 'cuz of Rowe's play The Fair Penitent (1702). Samuel Richardson's Clarissa owes a lot to that play.

Anyhow, this Rowe translated Book I of the Callipædia (there are four books, in all). The English version to which Rowe contributed is more than twice as long as the original. I have a facsimile of the original right here, and the poem occupies fifty-two not-at-all-crowded pages. The English is a hundred and thirty-seven.

That's actually fairly standard eighteenth-century translation praxis. The rhyming couplet offered the translator room to expand, clarify, and otherwise improve the original. Today, of course, any talk of "improving the original" is heresy, but it's good to be reminded occasionally that our assumptions about reading are not based on, shall we say, the laws of physics. Not everyone in history went to translations hoping to find exactly what the original writer said. In the eighteenth century it was quite reasonable to imagine that the English version of something might be quite a bit better than the original. Everyone could name examples of this. [End Page 55]

And it's not like Callipædia ever had the reputation of having been composed by a poetic genius. People were drawn to it, not because of Quillet's handling of neo-Latin hexameters, but because of the information the poem might contain. There was a porn possibility.

Remember: Europeans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries hadn't heard of the Kama Sutra yet. They needed one as much as anybody; good information was even more scarce then than it is now. And they also needed some kind (any kind) of excuse for thinking about sex. You don't want your kids to b

Reviewed by:

• The Country Where Everyone's Name Is Fear: Selected Poems by Boris and Ludmila Khersonsky
• Kathryn Weld (bio)

In 2017, Lost Horse Press established a dual-language series of poetry by important contemporary Ukrainian poets. The Country Where Everyone's Name Is Fear, by Boris and Ludmila Khersonsky, edited by Katie Ferris and Ilya Kaminsky, is the ninth volume in this series. These poems remind us of the role of the poet during times of war, in the particular context of the Ukrainian struggle for independence.

The reader will remember that the Russo-Ukrainian War is now more than a decade old, having begun after the Revolution of Dignity (February 2014), which ousted the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, and overthrew the Ukrainian government, and was immediately followed by the Russian annexation of the Crimea. During the eight subsequent years, Russia supported separatists in the Donbas region in armed conflict, naval attacks, and cyberwarfare. In February 2022, while Lost Horse Press was preparing for the book release, the war entered a phase of major escalation with the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia. The poems in The Country Where Everyone's Name Is Fear bear witness to nearly a decade of war.

The English portion of this dual-language publication is lean, featuring [End Page 106] only fifteen poems by Ludmila Khersonsky and fourteen by Boris Khersonsky. Nevertheless, this sampling is more than enough to reveal the stark desperation of current times in Ukraine, where "explosions are the new normal, you grow used to them / stop noticing that you, with your ordinary ways are a goner." There are hints that this myopia is a human condition, even when a people are mired in crisis: "against the background of lies, it's not apparent that we're also liars."

How to describe this, and what is the weight of that role as witness? Ludmila, in "How to Describe," tells us:

a man who turned to the wall, weary of war.Ear of the war: so much noise from a single man,as if a whale was birthed into a common shell,as if fear was trapped in the heart's punchbag.A lonely human is dust.Where to run from dust?

An award-winning lyric poet and translator, Ludmila Khersonsky was born in Moldavia. She has published three volumes of poetry, a fourth is forthcoming from Arrowsmith Press. Her

• It's the Algorithm, Stupid!
• Clare Birchall (bio) and Peter Knight (bio)

[End Page 10]

What drives the visibility and the virality of conspiracy theories in the United States and elsewhere today, especially in the online world? In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the spread of QAnon, and the storming of the Capitol, many writers—both academics and journalists—have addressed this question in a flood of books. Some have focused on the increasing political polarization and the lurch to right-wing populism. Others have argued that our innate psychological weakness is now being exploited by manipulators both domestic and foreign. Some have suggested that the rise of conspiracism is an inevitable consequence of the financial incentives, technological affordances, and the libertarian ethos of social media companies. Some have even insisted that these conspiracy theories—no matter how seemingly bizarre—are an understandable response to the normalization of corruption and conspiracy in US political life.

The journalist David Neiwert has been covering right-wing violent extremism in the United States for over two decades. In Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (2017) and Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us (2022) he charts the history of how the alt-right and its ideology of white nationalism came to influence contemporary American politics, becoming not only mainstream but, with Trump as the conspiracy-monger-in-chief in the White House, no longer stigmatized. H

Reviewed by:

• Conspiracy Theories in the Time of Covid-19 by Clare Birchall and Peter Knight
• Asbjørn Dyrendal (bio)

The COVID-19 pandemic brought on a mass of conspiracist speculations. It also brought massive speculations about conspiracism and research on the same. Clare Birchall and Peter Knight's Conspiracy Theories in the Time of Covid-19 is a masterful analysis of all three strands. A slim volume at two hundred pages, it manages to be encompassing, careful, nuanced, and sharply analytical.

The book includes an introduction, seven chapters, and a conclusion. The first chapter, on the cultural and political contexts from which COVID conspiracy theories emerged, is follow by a chapter on the "infodemic." Chapters 3 and 4 trace various COVID conspiracy theories over the first year of the pandemic, and chapters 5–7 discuss the features of COVID conspiracy theories, conspiracy entrepreneurs, and what Birchall and Knight call "dis-info capitalism." This structure allows the authors, as they state, to "visit and re-visit Covid-19 conspiracy theories, covering new ground each time" using new perspectives, foci, methods, and contexts. The contexts also include history, as conspiracy speculations, even about COVID, did not start with Trump, his fans, or QAnon. Concerns involving causes of health and illness have long been sites of speculations about hidden evil actors. Allegations of conspiracy stretch from antisemitic rumors that plagues were caused by poisoned wells in the Middle Ages to modern miracle cures that the proverbial "they" allegedly do not want to release to the public. That a pandemic would release a mass of conspiracy narratives was thus easy to predict, and the World Health Organization was quick to warn about an "infodemic" following the pandemic.

The concept of an "infodemic" has a certain immediate appeal, but it is analytically problematic and is treated as such in the book. In public communication [End Page 18] it was often pragmatically understood as "fake news" and conspiracy theories, and as such served as a warning about misinformation. The "curb appeal" of the concept thus relates to the topic of the book—the conspiracy theories. There were undoubtedly enough of those, but Birchall and Knight show that they constituted only a small percentage of the misinformation content produced on COVID.

That conspiracist content was but a small part of the overall discussion is important, but the authors are never dismissive of conspiracist content

Reviewed by:

• A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy by Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum
• Michael Butter (bio)

Conspiracy theories are an exciting topic but often tedious to study. That is because conspiracy theorists usually go to great lengths to prove their claims. They analyze sources and secret communication, draw on eyewitness reports and make inferences, and are obsessed with details. In Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, Augustin Barruel blames the Freemasons and Illuminati for orchestrating the French Revolution and provides footnotes on each of its several hundred pages; David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, which claims that 9/11 was an "inside job" conducted by the US government, unfolds its argument in 250 pages, which are followed by 80 pages of notes. The first text was published in 1797, the second in 2008. This shows how stable the mode of conspiracist argumentation has remained over the centuries. It was not even affected by the stigmatization that conspiracy theories underwent after World War II in Europe and North America, as Katharina Thalmann has shown in a meticulously argued book reviewed by Todor Hristov in this issue. When conspiracy theories ceased being the commonly accepted explanation of events and began to be eyed suspiciously by the majority of people, and especially by epistemic authorities, their proponents were left with two options. They could either embrace their marginalization and articulate their allegations openly in a language replete with claims of hidden plots and evil designs, or they could veil that they were spreading conspiracy theories by pretending to be just asking questions. Both options, however, meant presenting lengthy arguments and getting bogged down in details.

This way of presenting conspiracist allegations is what Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum call the "old conspiracism." Their intriguing claim [End Page 22] is that in the United States in recent years it has largely been superseded by what they call "the new conspiracism." Whereas the old conspiracism depended on evidence, the new one, they argue, thrives on repetition. An accusation is repeated over and over again, but no attempt is made to prove it. It is, in their memorable phrase, "conspiracy without the theory." The claim is validated when it is repeated by people who reiterate, retweet, like, or forward it: "If a lot of peopl