Word: books
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...better he should do so abroad." But whether in search of pleasure, polish, or the splendors of Palladian architecture, young Englishmen, usually with tutors, infested Europe for three centuries. With well-chosen pictures and pungent quotations from travelers (including Diarist John Evelyn, Tobias Smollett and Edward Gibbon), this book gives a remarkably funny and extremely revealing country-by-coun-try account of Albion's impact upon the Continent-and incontinent...
Trafalgar by David Howarth. 254 pages. Atheneum. $8.95. What Howarth did last year for Waterloo he has now done for Britain's most famous and decisive sea battle. The achievement is not quite so notable; yet the book is a most clear and readable account of the engagement that cost Nelson's life and destroyed Napoleon's last hope of invading Britain...
...Connoisseur's Book of the Cigar by Zino Davidoff. 92 pages. McGraw-Hill. $5.95. What really troubles a woman about cigars is not their aroma but the look of contentment that drifts across a man's face when he lights one up. No meat loaf could ever do that, and she resents it. This informative breviary of cigarabilia-kinds, sizes, shapes, how to light up, etc.-by a Swiss cigar dealer is unlikely to lessen that resentment. Mainly for men with a sense of humidor...
...Pursuit of the Mous, the Snaile, and the Clamm by Mary Durant. Illustrated by Victoria Chess. 247 pages. Meredith. $4.95. Subtitled "a roving dictionary of the animal kingdom," this lighthearted book traces the names of animals back to abstruse origins. (The lowly burrowing gopher, for example, derives from gaufre, the French word for honeycomb.) The illustrations are shaggy dog in style, but accompanying quotations from naturalists, explorers and novelists can be stern indeed. Thus Admiral Jaacob van Neck on the dodo bird, circa 1598: "They have thick heads only partially covered with feathers and in place of wings only...
...aardvark fried in yak butter to zabaglione a zingari, the compilers of cookbooks have turned to something really occult. Bats, eye of newt, serpents, felon's hands and less mentionable exotica seem to have formed the staple diet of the industrious witch. It should be said that this book serves no culinary purpose except perhaps to divert conversation among guests from the infamous concoctions some contemporary witch may happen to be serving in the name-not of the devil but Julia Child...