It has become a holiday tradition on the OUPblog to ask our favorite people about their favorite books.  This year we asked authors to participate (OUP authors and non-OUP authors).  For the next two weeks we will be posting their responses which reflect a wide variety of tastes and interests, in fiction, non-fiction and children’s books.  Check back daily for new books to add to your 2010 reading lists.  If that isn’t enough to keep you busy next year check out all the great books we have discovered during past holiday seasons: 2006, 2007, 2008 (US), and 2008 (UK).

Elliott J. Gorn is Professor of History and American Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Dillinger’s Wild Ride: The Year That Made America’s Public Enemy Number One, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America and Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America, among other books.

I’m a total sucker for Richard Russo. There is nothing fancy or trendy about his novels, just great prose, acute observation of what makes people tick, and some laughs along the way. His 1997 book Straight Man, for my money, is the best academic novel ever published. His early books like Nobody’s Fool and The Risk Pool were wonderful evocations of working class life. This year’s That Old Cape Magic, follows his more recent themes, like age and desire. Russo’s characters are always trying to make it through life unscathed, and of course they never succeed. You can’t read without an ache the description of Griffen (his main character) as a boy, the lonely son of two academics, discovering in a neighboring family a whole sensual and emotional world while on a Cape Cod vacation. Russo is always about the secrets we keep from ourselves coming back to haunt us decades later. I hoarded this book for a long plane ride, and it kept me flying hour after hour.

It has become a holiday tradition on the OUPblog to ask our favorite people about their favorite books.  This year we asked authors to participate (OUP authors and non-OUP authors).  For the next two weeks we will be posting their responses which reflect a wide variety of tastes and interests, in fiction, non-fiction and children’s books.  Check back daily for new books to add to your 2010 reading lists.  If that isn’t enough to keep you busy next year check out all the great books we have discovered during past holiday seasons: 2006, 2007, 2008 (US), and 2008 (UK).

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry.  Thompson is a frequent contributor to the OUPblog, check out his other posts here.

Once you begin writing about the Beatles, people feel little hesitation in asking your opinion about which books they should read on the fab four, usually with some special qualification. Just the other day, a woman asked me for advice on what Beatles biography I could recommend for her twelve-year-old daughter who had become infatuated with the band, but whom the mother wished to shield from the biological aspects of their lives. (I recommended Allan Kozinn’s short, but entertaining account of their lives, repertoire, and recordings.) Nevertheless, the dramatic arch of their story and the music they created remain a draw for generations born long, long after the years of Beatlemania. Indeed, the music of this era persists on college radio stations and in the iPods of students.

Since 1997, I have been coaching a seminar at Skidmore College where students comb through a variety of sources on the Beatles, in the process learning how authors spin their narratives. Over twelve weeks, teams of juniors and seniors compare biographies by Philip Norman, by Hunter Davies, and, of course, by the Beatles themselves in their Anthology (both in print and on video). How do different authors describe Brian Epstein’s death? How did the Beatles come to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show? They also examine the music through readings by authors such as Walter Everett and summations of their professional and recording career in Mark Lewisohn’s chronologies. They then present their findings to their classmates. A pleasant time is guaranteed for all.

Each of these sources (and others) possesses qualities to recommend; but of all the books on the Beatles I have required, for sheer readability I offer Jonathan Gould’s Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America. When I first opened this book, I found myself unwilling to close the cover and spent a weekend reliving a tragedy I knew well, but in which I found renewed fascination through Gould’s depiction. In particular, he brings a casual familiarity to his writing about this music that many writers have attempted but failed to fulfill.

Kirsty in Oxford here with your weekly dose of link love. This is my last day in the office until January, so I’m in an extremely festive mood and looking forward to two weeks of food, family, and festivity. That said, I’ll be rushing around trying to get things finished, so I might not have time to procrastinate this afternoon. If you do, however, feast your eyes on these.

In the midst of blogs and articles full of people telling us which books they loved this year (have you been reading OUPblog’s Holiday Book Bonanza?), The Guardian asks which books were unjustly forgotten.

Here in the OUP UK publicity department we have developed a slight haggis fixation. The office has been alive with shouts of “Haggis camera 2!”

Seed Magazine has chosen Philip Ball’s Nature’s Patterns as one of their December giveaway books.

These cartoons were deemed too rude by the Victorians.

Why does American chocolate taste so different to our British stuff?

New Scientist reports that a brain scan might be able to tell who is likely to keep promises and who isn’t.

The Daily Telegraph’s Christmas Books Quiz 2009. One of our Very Short Introductions is an answer to one of the questions, but I’m not telling you which one! And while I’m on the subject, have you tried our Very Short Introductions quiz?

The BBC didn’t take to Led Zeppelin on first listen.

Who will be the UK’s Christmas number 1 single? Joe McElderry, latest winner of The X Factor (our American Idol, for those who don’t know) or Rage Against the Machine?

The changing face of Sherlock Holmes.

Cheese or font?

This is my favourite Christmas song. What’s yours?

It has become a holiday tradition on the OUPblog to ask our favorite people about their favorite books.  This year we asked authors to participate (OUP authors and non-OUP authors).  For the next two weeks we will be posting their responses which reflect a wide variety of tastes and interests, in fiction, non-fiction and children’s books.  Check back daily for new books to add to your 2010 reading lists.  If that isn’t enough to keep you busy next year check out all the great books we have discovered during past holiday seasons: 2006, 2007, 2008 (US), and 2008 (UK).

Donald A. Ritchie, historian of the Senate, is the author of Doing Oral History, and of the forthcoming The U.S. Congress: A Very Short Introduction.  Ritchie has been Associate Historian of the United States Senate for more than three decades.

Having read more than my share of political autobiographies, I did not expect to enjoy Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s memoir, True Compass, as much as I did. This type of venture is often a collaboration with a professional writer, as was Kennedy’s with Ron Powers, but True Compass rises well above the usual “as told to” book. From the start, the text is in Kennedy’s voice, capturing his cadences, passions, and humor. The memoir succeeds because it draws on an oral history program that Kennedy launched five years earlier, when he commissioned the Miller Center at the University of Virginia to conduct interviews with himself, his family, and his staff. Kennedy’s thirty hours of interviews with the project’s team of interviewers, supplemented by further discussions with Powers, sustain the book’s vitality and his reminiscences offer candid glimpses into his personal and political life.

Ted Kennedy was at his best describing his childhood as “the kid in the family” with a dynamic but domineering father, a pious but distant mother, and three dashing and competitive older brothers (his sisters to a lesser degree). He affectionately recalled mornings on horseback, riding behind his father along the cranberry roads of Cape Cod, but also recited the cold frankness of his father’s lecturing him on the need for seriousness of purpose if he wanted paternal attention. Kennedy shared his memories of the unfortunate choices his family made for his schooling, the whirl of events around his father’s ambassadorship, the exhilaration of the 1960 presidential campaign, his personal stumbles, and the tragic endings that his brothers met.

The older that Kennedy grows, the memoir offers fewer revelations, but that is something characteristic of many oral histories, when narrators define their glory days more in terms of their youthful adventures than their mature accomplishments. Kennedy did offer abundant insights into the U.S. Senate, where he served for forty-seven years. These range from his coming to grips with such hidebound committee chairmen as Mississippi’s James Eastland, to his coping with a string of presidents who viewed him as a potential rival. Generous to most everyone he described, Kennedy could not hide his bitterness towards Jimmy Carter, whom he viewed as having wasted the Democratic majorities in Congress and frustrated efforts to enact liberal programs stalled during the Nixon and Ford administrations. Still, it was Kennedy’s loss of the presidential nomination to Carter in 1980 that finally freed him from a perpetual quest for the White House and enabled him to focus on becoming an outstanding senator, through his oratory, coalition building, committee work, parliamentary skills, and talented staff. The book puts into perspective a question so frequently asked over this past year: Who will be the next Ted Kennedy? When Kennedy first ran for the Senate, no one–including himself–would have predicted that he would evolve into such a legislative craftsman. How he achieved that stature makes his memoir fascinating reading.

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About 2500 years ago a fellow named Hanno was put in charge of sixty ships and sailed out of the Mediterranean and down the western coast of Africa.

The account of his voyage was later translated into Greek and much later drawn upon to give a scientific name to the largest primate.

According to the accounts that come down to us, Hanno and his crew came upon an island upon which they found what they called “wild people,” mostly female whose bodies were covered with hair.

They had made contact with local Africans who apparently told them that the females of these hairy people were called gorillas.

Hanno reported that they chased and caught three females but when the animals fought and bit savagely they were killed and skinned. Hanno and his crew brought the skins home to Carthage along with this story.

I’m not sure if the females being caught and killed influenced the association of the word with females in Hanno’s mind.

The fact that these wild people were caught in a way that allowed them to scratch and bite their captors supports the modern thinking that these were perhaps chimpanzees and not what we would think of as gorillas.

Then in 1847 a Boston missionary (appropriately named Savage) returning from Africa brought along some bones of a giant man-like creature to which he and a colleague gave the scientific name Troglodytes gorilla; pulling the second part of the name from the accounts of Hanno.

You may have heard the word troglodyte; figuratively it means “cave-man.” That’s because back through Latin and Greek troglodyte is built on two words meaning “hole” “go into.”

It has become a holiday tradition on the OUPblog to ask our favorite people about their favorite books.  This year we asked authors to participate (OUP authors and non-OUP authors).  For the next two weeks we will be posting their responses which reflect a wide variety of tastes and interests, in fiction, non-fiction and children’s books.  Check back daily for new books to add to your 2010 reading lists.  If that isn’t enough to keep you busy next year check out all the great books we have discovered during past holiday seasons: 2006, 2007, 2008 (US), and 2008 (UK)

Reb Williams has been writing for a living from the day she got paid in sherry and pies for an evening’s entertainment at the local Women’s Institute Christmas Party. Since then she’s worked for anyone who’ll give her money, from peers of the realm to bus drivers. Along the way she’s been a condom packer, orchestra-pit trombonist, voice-over artist, barbershop singer and the back end of a pantomime cow. Her most recent book is Grow Your Own Cows which is published by The Mund Publishing. 

This year, working on my own book about growing up in the Good Life, I revisited the book that was my family’s bible throughout the seventies – John Seymour’s Self Sufficiency. Although there’s an updated version still in print for today’s Grow Your Own-ers, the original has a particular power for those of us who, like my family, used Seymour’s template to shake up our own lives and quit the rat race. Written in a no-nonsense style, with a pinch of humour, the book tells it how it is to go back to the land. How can you resist a guru who tells you to always keep a cockerel with your chickens because “hens like having it off as much as we do”? Or in this quote from the 1973 edition:

“The trickle of dropouts coming from the cities into the countryside is increasing year by year. One can almost say now that it is becoming a small flood. Unfortunately these people don’t seem to have the slightest idea what to do when they get into the country…”

He was describing us. I’m sure of it.

It has become a holiday tradition on the OUPblog to ask our favourite people about their favourite books.  This year we asked authors to participate (OUP authors and non-OUP authors).  For the next two weeks we will be posting their responses which reflect a wide variety of tastes and interests, in fiction, non-fiction and children’s books.  Check back daily for new books to add to your 2010 reading lists.  If that isn’t enough to keep you busy next year check out all the great books we have discovered during past holiday seasons: 2006, 2007, 2008 (US), and 2008 (UK).

As well as authors, though, I’ve been asking some of my favourite UK book bloggers for their picks of the year. I posted the first crop yesterday, and here are the rest.

Lynne Hatwell is better known to the blogosphere as Dovegrey Reader:

It hasn’t been difficult to muster up a favourite read or two from this year because what a memorable and inspiring year 2009 has been for both fiction and non-fiction and if there’s one books that sits at the top of the list for me it’s The Music Room by William Fiennes.

William Fiennes is the master of the poetic and lyrical memory, there is a gentle melody to this book which not only recalls his incredible childhood growing up in the inherited family seat which happened to be a castle, but also growing up with his older brother Richard who suffers from a severe form of epilepsy.

The castle provides a magical backdrop to an enviable childhood; water-filled, pike-laden moat, gatehouse, turrets and battlements, medieval chapel and acres of unlived-in rooms and attics stuffed full with not the normal stuff of lofts. Forget the Christmas decorations and Fisher-Price toys you can’t bear to part with, William wanders around trying on old armour and rattling sabres. But this is a home that must earn its keep (sorry) and so the family live a private life in a very public space, as rooms are opened to the public and visiting film crews, while the whole family turn their hand to talking and guiding people around their home. But behind all this lies Richard and his increasingly debilitating fits, with the brain damage and medication leading to violent and erratic behaviour and general unpredictability, but he is surrounded by love and a family who accept and understand him with the patience of the saints.

Somehow Richard’s outbursts seem containable within a castle, the fabric of this stronghold can tolerate and absorb his violence, his fists are unlikely to go through the walls; together with the provision of a magical setting in which to grow up, it’s something else castles are good at, they’ve seen it all before.

Books like this leave a feeling, a resonating mood, for me a pitch-perfect sense of optimism and goodness, I think The Music Room will be a book to revisit every so often, there is something timeless and quite life-enhancing about it.

Elaine Simpson-Long blogs at Random Jottings:

Edith Wharton – Hermione Lee. Only read this book in 2009 though I have had it for some time. Very dense, very scholarly as you would expect from this author, and totally absorbing. The main reason I found this book so engrossing was the linking and analysis of the writing with Edith’s life and her state of mind and location at the time each book was written, all of which have a bearing on the individual novels, short stories and poems.

Demobbed – Alan Allport. History is marvellously fascinating, I have always found it so, and when you read a book such as this one realises all over again that the great events, the great battles, the great treaties, all the great memorable historical events are all about the people, those who took part and whose lives were touched and shaped by being involved at the time. Immensely readable, immensely fascinating social history.

Lucy Maud Montgomery – Mary Rubio. Read this superb biography at the same time I was reading Montgomery’s Journals. How LMM managed to write all these wonderful joyous books when her life was so difficult and she suffered from depression and unhappily married, is a mystery to me.

Kisses on a Postcard – Terence Frisby. Gorgeous, heart-warming, funny, delightful – two small boys evacuated to Cornwall at the outbreak of the Second World War who are lucky enough to be billeted with Auntie Rose and Uncle Jack. Touching and disarming it had me in tears at the end.

Charles Dickens – Michael Slater. Cannot imagine that another biography of the great man need ever be written again. Concentrating on his life as a writer, this will leave you reeling at the sheer volume and intensity of Dickens writing and amazement that he managed to find the time to do it all.

Henrietta’s War – Joyce Dennys. Published by the Bloomsbury Group, books ‘chosen by readers for readers’ this is a gem, no other word for it. Read, laugh, cry and enjoy.

A good year and I could mention many more titles, but these are my stand out reads of 2009.

Simon Savidge of Savidge Reads:

When I was asked to choose my favourite book of 2009 I had to think long and hard, should it be something new published this year, should I find a title that’s a bit out there? In the end I opted for a book that I wish someone had raved about so much I ran out and bought it, and that’s what I am hoping you will do with East Lynne by Ellen Wood.

I had never heard of East Lynne until I did some research into the Sensation Novels (I love Wilkie Collins) which I thought would make great autumn reads whilst making me read more classics as I tend to pick up contemporary novels. Odd really as sensation novels have everything you could want in them; be it murder, jilted lovers, deceit, mystery, twisting plots and wonderful characters. East Lynne is no exception apart from the fact that its exceptional, no wonder people call it ‘the mother of all sensation novels’.

The tale is of Lady Isabel who as the novel opens meets two men one Carlyle falls in love with her one site, the other Captain Francis Levison a charming man who proves a real rogue. Isabel marries one but things come into play which lead her away and into the arms of another meaning she looses her children and will do anything to get them back.

In parts the book is implausible (that is what makes it so great and all sensation fiction is), it looks at social history in the Victorian times when divorce was becoming available. It also looks at the sanctity of ‘family’ in that period as step mothers who were from second marriages, not from the death of the first wife but of divorce instead, started to appear more things for women were changing again as naturally divorces were always in favour of the male party. All this whilst being a gripping read with a wonderful cast of characters like the often flighty and slightly idiotic Isabel, the bubbly Barbara Hare was a very interesting character with hidden depths and the icy, sister in law spinster Cornelia Carlyle who just for me walked off every page of the book as if she was in the room with me. Throw in all of the plots, back stories and twists and I was left quite breathless by its brilliance.

Simon Thomas of Stuck in a Book:

Usually when choosing my favourite book of the year, I have to weigh up various titles, and the winner is something of a surprise to me, having had several contenders. This year, I was only halfway through Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill when I realised that it would be my Top Book of 2009 – or at least it would take a newly-discovered Jane Austen manuscript to beat it. Basically, from the beautiful cover onwards, it’s everything bookish and literary that you could possibly wish for.

The premise is that Susan Hill will spend a year reading only books she has on her shelves. Not just unread books, but revisiting those from the past – much-read favourites alongside ones she’s always meant to read. As she writes: ‘a book which is left on a shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with the potential to burst into new life.’ In truth, most of Howards End is on the Landing is speculative, wondering which books might be read, and remembering her experiences with them, rather than reappraisals of the re-reads and newly reads. Is this an autobiography through reading? In a way, perhaps. But it is much more embracing than that – personal anecdotes, yes (her meeting with Iris Murdoch is quietly heart-breaking), but also chapters on how books can be shelved, whether or not to write in them, what constitutes a funny book, and on a huge range of authors from Enid Blyton to Jane Austen to Penelope Fitzgerald… It’s a bit like a very well-edited, and selective, blog. And I mean that as a compliment.

Above all, Susan Hill has written something delightfully, wisely, enchantingly bookish. I feel I have been around her old farmhouse, with its rooms full of bookcases – I feel her surprise when she happens upon an unexpected old friend on her uncategorised shelves. Mostly, I have fallen even more deeply in love with my own books.

There are some books which are read reluctantly; others so addictive that they are read walking down the street. Then there are those – and this is a rare, wonderful category – that are laid aside often, because the thought of finishing them, of having no more to read, is awful. Howards End is on the Landing is in this category – what higher praise can I offer?

It has become a holiday tradition on the OUPblog to ask our favorite people about their favorite books.  This year we asked authors to participate (OUP authors and non-OUP authors).  For the next two weeks we will be posting their responses which reflect a wide variety of tastes and interests, in fiction, non-fiction and children’s books.  Check back daily for new books to add to your 2010 reading lists.  If that isn’t enough to keep you busy next year check out all the great books we have discovered during past holiday seasons: 2006, 2007, 2008 (US), and 2008 (UK).

Sharon Zukin is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. In her new book Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, she explains how the rapid and pervasive demand for authenticity–evident in escalating real estate prices, expensive stores, and closely monitored urban streetscapes–has helped drive out the very people who first lent a neighborhood its authentic aura: immigrants, the working class, and artists.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has sat on a low bookshelf in my dining room for years. Just this September, because of the economic crisis, I decided to read it. I knew it was a Depression-era classic, and I hoped it would be a guide to how to think about massive job loss and rising hunger rates. Even people who haven’t read the book know Walker Evans’s black-and-white photographs of sober-faced men in denim overalls and straw hats, sad-eyed wives and daughters in shapeless dresses like flour sacks, and barefoot children with dirty hands sitting outside wooden shanties: images of rural poverty as strange and familiar as an ancient dream.

The truly remarkable thing about this book, though, is James Agee’s prose. A poet and fiction writer, Agee is Friedrich Engels with William Faulkner’s pen. He exposes lack of hope in a rural south of sharecroppers and tenant farmers, where landless whites try to hold onto a shred of respectability among their neighbors and a fragile sense of unearned superiority to nearby blacks. Agee layers detailed observations of landscapes and houses, material possessions—few as they are, and desires that are buried so deep no one can speak about them.

An outdated picture calendar hanging on a nail on the kitchen wall, a sickly sore-infested mule, clay-covered work shoes with more clay crusted under the uppers, sweat stains at the ankles, slashed open to give room to their owner’s corns: Agee records every painful image. With great tenderness he describes a man and woman sleeping on a shallow mattress on their iron bed, the last night of freedom of a young girl visiting her family before returning to her husband, a “mean and jealous” man in a distant town whom she does not love, the “baroque rusting iron” of a kitchen stove. He is an unusually self-conscious writer, “reflexive,” we sociologists now call it, a post-modern ethnographer in modern literary form. No wonder Fortune magazine, which sent Agee and Evans on a reporting trip to Alabama for six weeks in 1936, refused to publish his articles.

Though Agee doesn’t preach a Marxist gospel, he makes no secret of sharing communist ideals. He believes that each man and woman should be free to achieve their highest potential, and he clearly regrets the impassable roads and lack of future prospects that make it so hard for the children to go to school. The fact, as he records it, that he has never seen the mother in one family wearing shoes, and that another woman’s work dresses are made of fertilizer sacks, and that the small kitchen’s leaky tin roof and wood-fired stove make it so hot “at the noon meal time that, merely entering it, sweat is started in a sheet from the whole surface of the body, and the solar plexus and the throat are clutched into tight kicking knots which relax sufficiently to admit food only after two or three minutes”—all of this takes an intolerable toll on human life and, we feel, on the writer. This book is both a powerful social document and an incredibly poetic piece of work.

My favorite of all these books is the four little red volumes of Maurice Sendak’s Nutshell Library. From an early age, a child can hold each one in her hand, and the four tiny volumes, packaged together in a little brown cardboard box, are a physical object a child can love. I used to read them to my daughter while she was eating in her high chair, for now they are covered with apple juice spots and wiped-off bits of scrambled egg. Three of the books teach cultural literacy in simple rhymes: Alligators All Around: An Alphabet, One Was Johnny: A Counting Book, Chicken Soup With Rice: A Book of Months. They’re wonderful to read aloud: “In May/ I truly think it best/ to be a robin/ lightly dressed/ concocting soup/inside my nest./ Mix it once/ mix it twice/ mix that chicken soup/ with rice.” These lines are never boring.

The fourth book is different. Rhymed like the others, Pierre: A Cautionary Tale in Five Chapters and a Prologue tells a story about a boy just this side of nasty who rejects his parents’ love. One night when they go out and leave him at home alone (unlikely in fact, but truly Sendakian), Pierre is devoured by a hungry lion. I don’t want to spoil the ending, so I’ll just quote the prologue: “Read his story/ my friend,/ for you’ll find/ at the end/ that a suitable/ moral lies there.” I wish all stories could end so well.

By Anatoly Liberman

Wedlock, a native English noun, has, as usual, a Romance synonym, namely, matrimony. We will leave out of consideration the raptures of married life (as a lackadaisical damsel put it in Pride and Prejudice, but I am quoting from memory), and give thought to word origins. Matrimony poses no problems, except for the curious way its meaning developed. Matrimonium, the Latin source of matrimony, contains the root of mater “mother,” and its literal sense is “motherhood,” but in Latin it meant only “the state of being married,” while the plural (matrimonia) meant “married women” and “spouses.” Obviously, at first matrimony referred to a woman’s becoming a wife and a mother.

By contrast, wedlock, though also transparent as regards its form, is much harder to explain. The Old English for wedlock was wedlac (with long a in lac, as in Modern Engl. father). At some remote time, the verb wed meant “pledge.” The difficult part is -lock, from -lac. In 1889 Henry Bradley, the second editor of the OED, published an article titled “Some Obscure Words in Middle English” and wondered what to do with lac, which has been recorded with an astounding variety of meanings: “play; battle; sacrifice; gift; booty; message” and, when combined with the prefix ge- (in gelac), “tumult, commotion; crowd, host.” Students of Old English have offered those glosses to clarify the sentences in which the words occur, and several senses can be combined, for example, “battle” and “booty” (the warrior’s reward), “battle” and “play” (compare play, a modern fencing term), “gift” and “sacrifice.” It is also easy to build a semantic bridge from “play” to “swords’ play, battle; tumult, commotion” and from them to “booty” and “sacrifice” (prisoners of war were regularly sacrificed to the gods eager for offerings). Given enough intermediate sections, such bridges can connect almost any two meanings. The groups “play, sport; battle” and “sacrifice; gift; booty; (?) message” may be different words (homonyms), even if some putative ancient root sanctifies their union.

Alongside lac, there was the Old Engl. verb lacan. The evidence of its senses in various Germanic languages yields “jump; play, dance, swing; mock.” Lacan may be allied to Old Engl. lican “to like” and “to be like someone, resemble.” In Old English, lac became a suffix and occurred in about a dozen recorded words with the approximate meaning “action, practice.” Among them we find brydlac “nuptials” (bryd “bride’), a perfect counterpart of wedlac. Bradley wrote: “I do not think that [in wedlac] the sense of this suffix is derived from the sense ‘play’ (and certainly not from that of ‘offering’) but that it has reference to the root in the sense of ‘resemblance’, as in the adjective like and the noun lic, body.” This knot has never been disentangled, and in the final version of the entry wedlock the OED only says that -lac is a suffix, which it certainly is.

The Old Germanic languages have a great number of words for “wedding.” This is natural, if we look at the rituals connected with the marriage ceremony. They go all the way from obtaining a bride (heroic wooing, ransom, abduction) and bringing her to her new household to drinking the newlyweds’ health at the feast (bridal, now an adjective because of the deceptive appearance of -al, goes back to bride-ale), “great, solemn time” (such is German Hochzeit, a word with a convoluted semantic history), and “lying together.” Both the bride and the bridegroom had to perform numerous elaborate actions. The true meaning of words like Norwegian bryllup (from bryd-lup), literally “bride-run” (or “bride-dance”?), which has cognates outside Scandinavia, remains a partially unsolved riddle. In this context, brydlac, mentioned above, makes more sense than wedlac. Whatever “play” was involved in the lac, one can imagine that the bridegroom participated in some “sport” or that an abduction was staged. But wedlock is not a ceremony; it is the state of being married, and rituals have nothing to do with it. Even lac “gift” is of little help: “a gift given to a bride” will again fit the sense “wedding” but not “matrimony.” Also, Bradley’s “resemblance” sheds no light on the derivation of the word. Did he mean “having the form of a pledge”?

Most probably, -lac was added to wed- mechanically on the analogy of brydlac (just as we can add -ment to pay and get payment, without bothering about what this Romance element… once meant), and trying to find the probably nonexistent deep original sense of the compound will lead us nowhere. Of all the nouns with -lac only wedlock has been preserved, so that today we have nothing to compare it with. In knowledge (a Middle English word), -ledge appears to be related to Old Engl. -lac, but the affinity is remote (compare the voiced end with the pronunciation of Greenwich or hodgepodge alternating with hotchpotch). Middle Engl. knoweleche (this is one of many recorded forms) had a suffix allied to Old Icelandic -leikr and by the same token to Old Engl. -lac, but it may have been derived from a verb of the same type as Modern Engl. acknowledge. In any case, knowledge is unable to explain the origin of wedlock. In Middle English, long a (as in father, not as in lake!) changed to long o (as in British Engl. awe), and in -lok it was later shortened; hence -lock, and an association between wedlock and the idea of a couple “locked” in a union or with the Middle English noun loc “enclosure; settlement.” For completeness’ sake hemlock may be mentioned here. One of its two main Old English forms was hemlic, so that -lock must be a folk etymological alteration of -lic. The same holds for charlock, another plant name (from cerlic). And with this we are out of wedlock.

Several years ago, I had the good fortune of inheriting a book from another publicist. I had no idea at the time what good fortune this was for me, that the author of that book would not only be an amazing partner on the publicity trail but would also become a fast friend.

Harvey J. Kaye is the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, published by the Hill & Wang imprint of Farrar, Straus & Giroux and he is currently working on a book for H&W on the Four Freedoms. He very kindly agreed to take time out from writing his book to write about his favorite books for the OUPBlog holiday book round-up. Harvey is Director of the Center for History and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay and also the author of a young adult book published by OUP called Thomas Paine: Firebrand of the Revolution.

Happy Holidays everyone! Enjoy!

My three favorite books of all time are Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776), E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963), and T.H. White’s The Once and Future King (1958). But I have written elsewhere of those. So, I’m taking the liberty here of talking about my current favorites.

Deeply involved in writing a new book, The Four Freedoms and the Promise of America, I often feel like I am living in the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, my wife probably feels that way, too, given the piles of books from and on the Depression, New-Deal, and Second-World-War years that adorn nearly every room in our rather tiny house… Oh, how I love buying secondhand books on-line! And I confess that I have overdone it. But of course I do not relish every volume. Who could find the American Liberty League’s pamphlets or Father Coughlin’s radio rants inspiring or enjoyable (other than maybe someone like Amity Shlaes or Pat Buchanan, respectively)?

Having confessed to my addiction… I should note that it’s all in the cause of cultivating American democratic history, memory, and imagination. And in those terms my favorite books are The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt; Max Lerner’s It is Later than You Think: The Need for a Militant Democracy (1938); and Norman Corwin’s radio plays, We Hold These Truths (1941) and On A Note of Triumph (1945).

It’s hard taking FDR’s collected speeches to bed. But it’s worth trying. You will find them inspiring… Through them Roosevelt encouraged his fellow citizens not only to fight the Depression and Fascism, but also to challenge his own administration to advance policies and programs that would extend and deepen freedom, equality, and democracy.

To sustain myself in my work – and to remind myself of what it’s all about past and present – I regularly return to Lerner’s and Steinbeck’s books. In It Is Later than You Think, Lerner contended that democracy’s survival required fighting not only “fascist imperialism without,” but also “the anarchy of unplanned capitalism, the concentration of corporate power, the sabotaging effects of reactionary business, [and] the incipient fascist movement within.” And in Once There Was a War, Steinbeck – better than most writers then and since – critically articulated the thoughts and anxieties of America’s GIs. He rightly contended that as much as they believed in the Four Freedoms – freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear – and were ready to fight to secure them, they were anxious about what politicians and industrialists back home were committed to doing about it, for it struck those GIs that Congress was doing its damnedest to kill any policy or program that would enable them to realize those freedoms. Do such things sound familiar?

In that spirit I would note that I not only firmly subscribe to Lerner’s progressive observation that “The basic story in the American past, the only story ultimately worth the telling, is the story of the struggle between the creative and the frustrating elements in the American democratic adventure,” I actually put it on all my syllabi.

Admittedly, Norman Corwin’s radio plays – We Hold These Truths (1941) and On A Note of Triumph (1945) – should be heard not read. But once you’ve listened to them the reading becomes all the richer and you’ll want to recite the lines aloud yourself. Corwin wrote We Hold These Truths for the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights (December 11, 1941) and On A Note of Triumph for VE Day (May 8, 1945). And tens of millions of Americans tuned in to hear them. I particularly like the opening lines of the latter:

“So they’ve given up.
They’re finally done in, and the rat is dead in an alley back of the Wilhelmstrasse.
Take a bow, G.I.,
The superman of tomorrow lies at the feet of you common men of this afternoon.”

There’s nothing I’ve seen on television to compare to that.

But even more than those, I liked – for days stuck indoors – the works of Mitsumasa Anno, especially his wordless but richly-illustrated books, Anno’s Journey (1978), Anno’s Britain (1982), and Anno’s U.S.A.(1983), each of which takes the reader on a trip filled with wonderful images historical and legendary. The fun is in trying to discover all the cultural references past and present and, in your own words, making all those images and references live in the imaginations of your kids. Now that I think about it, they were visual primers in cultural literacy.