WORDY

Simon Schama may be the most erudite and eloquent intellectual of our time. Typical "writer's guides" are good at explaining the rules of the game, they don't really show the game in action. Those "writer's guides" are a Junior-level textbook, but "Wordy" is material for PhD-level case study in masterful writing.

This book is for the serious logophile and/or bibliophile! I believe I possess a more-than-adequate personal lexicon but within a few pages I was scrambling for the OED...digital or otherwise! However, if that is your bent, you might...might!...enjoy Schama rattling rambunctious critique of "high art, low appetite and the power of memory," as the blurb informs the reader. The problem is that the author seems blind to the irony advanced in his general theme in that he (supposedly humorously, I think) rails against words, literature and art, that are in his words, "...not so much dithyrambically wordy as just prolix", when in the substance of his critiques that is precisely what he is displaying. "...the grand style of Victorian writing approaches a sonorous equivalent to Gothic Revival buildings...But at its best it achieves a kind of intense poetic illumination. Ruskin ends his autobiography, 'Praeterita,with a stupendous threnody, a perfect execution of what Erasmus classified as 'superlatio', which depends for its power on a song-dance like cadence, the dancing motion of the words matching the bobbing fireflies that give off its supernal radiance." Prolix? Perish the thought...but never the adjective...or three! All of that being said, if you can stomach the author's front-and-centre, self-promoting genius, the book does contain some interesting and thoughtful reflections across a wide range of literariness. But, oh dear, it positively reeks of Simon Schama's own cleverness!