Dartmouth Authors

Richard C. Colton '25, Love Those Vermonters. Privately printed, 1981. Illustrated. Softcover. 86 pp. A generous collection of that durable sub-species of American humor, the "Vermont story," but also interspersed with the author's reminiscences and accounts of a few of Vermont's more notable personages and places. The hallmarks of Vermont humor, Colron observes, are frugality and literalness. (Tourist seeking directions: "Does it matter which one of these roads I take to Burlington"? Vermont farmer: "Not t'me, it don't.") Arising naturally out of the Vermonter's understated, literal attitude toward the stuff of everyday rural life, Vermont stories tend to cluster around several themes: farming, tippling, religion, weather, tourists, even death (tombstone epitaph in Stowe: "I was somebody. Who, is no business of yours."). Colton's collection covers most of the variations within the genre.

Robert C. Gilboy '27, Gilboy's Spell ItFast. Acropolis Books, 1981. Softcover. 286 pp. The last time anyone thought of the idea was in 1872, when William Swinton published his Word-Book of EnglishSpelling. Now, with the help of his four sons, Gilboy has dusted off the old item, modernized it, and come up with a quickuse speller which makes moot the age-old question: If you can't spell it in the first place, how are you supposed to find it in the dictionary? Gilboy's idea is simplicity itselt: he arranges his words thematically, 25,000 of them under 60 general categories. Want to spell "Melpomene"? Look under Mythology; it's there in alphabetical order. "Mulligatawny"? It's under Foods. Vox clamantis in deserto"? Under Foreign Words and Phrases, of course.

Norman Fiering '56, Jonathan Edward'sMoral Thought and Its British Context. University of North Carolina Press, 1981. 391 pp. Building upon his earlier Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard, Fiering now focuses upon the ethical thought of the famous 18th-century Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards. Though Edwards is usually considered primarily a theologian, "his most lasting and developed writings may also be seen as contributions to the new moral philosophy," Fiering argues in this book, which is "the first that has consistently tried to read Edwards in the context of British and Continental moral philosophy and the first that has made an effort to trace his thought developmentally." Fiering is editor of publications at the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia.

Robert T. Christgau '62, Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies. Ticknor & Fields, 1981. 471 pp. Having written the "Consumer Guide" column and weekly capsule reviews of semipopular record albums for Newsday and the VillageVoice for over a decade, Christgau has collected those reviews - substantially revised, rewritten, and augmented into this compendious book in which almost 3,000 albums of the 1970s are reviewed and graded. Christgau is witty, literate, iconoclastic; he scorns sacred cows, anathematizes music-industry hype. His grade range from A + ("an organically conceived masterpiece that repays prolonged listening with new excitement and insight") to E - ("an organically conceived masterpiece that repays repeated listening with a sense of horror in the face of the void'). Christgau is music editor of the yillageVoice.

Martha Redding Pease '79, The Bookshopsof London. Junction Books, 1981. Softcover. 390 pp. An indispensable guide for the bibliophile abroad, but fascinating reading for the armchair traveler to boot. There are perhaps as many as 500 bookshops in London; Ms. Pease's guidebook covers over 90 per cent of them. The famous Foyles is here, as are also such prestigious antiquarian shops as Maggs Brothers and Bernard Quaritch Ltd.; but so too are most of their lesser known coevals such as the Balham Food and Book Shop and Stone Trough Books. Following official postal codes, Ms. Pease divides London into five geographical districts; WC, EC, East London, North London, and North West London. Within each she lists the shops under four categories: gen- eral, antiquarian, secondhand, and specialty.