Books in General

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. In this witty, wide-ranging collection of essays, Solomon Eagle appears as a sharp-eyed, amused observer of books, readers, politics, language, and literary pretension. The opening "Who's Who" turns a reference book into a comic addiction, tracing the narrator's delight in obscure facts and his guilty invention of a false American identity so elaborate it nearly becomes a second life. From there, the essays skewer the dreariness of party songs, contrast them with more vital socialist verse, and satirize an overblown Indian-style epic about Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, whose florid grandeur makes royal history gleam with comic excess. The volume also ranges through epigrams and epitaphs, lamenting the decline of compact wit, and takes aim at Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence's fervent Bacon-as-Shakespeare theories. It defends the word "Colonial" against artificial replacement, arguing that language changes naturally. Finally, it revisits Shakespeare through a debate over his women, rejecting the charge that they are unreal and insisting that figures like Lady Macbeth, Juliet, Cleopatra, Beatrice, and Rosalind reveal a dramatist who made men and women equally vivid, complex, and human.