March Books: more books than paragraphs, this time

George R. Stewart, Names on the Land. A discursive and often amusing discussion of how some places in the United States got their names. Stewart isn't primarily looking for individual stories, but for patterns: the different kinds of names given by explorers and settlers, by Spanish explorers and French, and just by people of different attitudes, backgrounds, and employment. Explorers frequently named things after patrons, as well as after friends, and members of their crew who died along the way. Most of the patterns are meaningless in the abstract, so he gives lots of examples, but they're not selected primarily for "here's a weird name." He discusses folk etymology, both in the sense of names shifting to sound more like words, and in the sense of names appealing because of what people were told they meant. Alaska seems to have originally been a name for a peninsula in what is now that state; "great land" may have come from a Russian explorer's reference to the area as "bolshaya zemblya," translating something from a Chukchi informant. I particularly liked the maps showing "eastern watercourse generics," that is, the relative frequency of creek, brook, run, and stream in the names of streams too small to be called "river." This is a good book to dip into in bits, in part because it's written in lots of small chapters. (I renewed the library loan twice; I have been reading other things as well, and it's a bit large for me to read on the subway.) Stewart had an extremely varied writing career; if the name sounds vaguely familiar it's probably from his novel Earth Abides. He later wrote another volume on place names outside the U.S., which I will probably read, but not right away.

Lloyd Alexander, The Kestrel, discussed elsewhere to avoid accidental spoilers (since we're discussing these books in mrissa's journal.

Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell. This claims to be the story of the "greatest art hoax of the twentieth century." I can't judge that, but it's a good story about forgery and some of the ways that people become convinced that something is, or is not, authentic, and why it's hard to get them to change their minds. Dolnick points out that there is no absolute scientific test for authenticity (as there is for whether a metal object is really gold). At best, science can say "this can't be a Vermeer, it uses a pigment invented long after he died," but a work can pass all the scientific tests and still be fake, either because the forger has come up with a new method, or because it's an old forgery. Interestingly, van Meegeren's fake Vermeers weren't detected by either a scientist or an art expert. Rather, after the war, someone who was investigating the looting of Dutch art found his name on papers related to art sales to Goering, and investigated. Eventually, he confessed—and wasn't believed at first, for the same reason that he confessed: art forgery would have gotten him at most a short prison sentence, and selling a Vermeer to the Nazis could have been considered treason, a hanging offense.

Sarah Caudwell, The Shortest Way to Hades, Thus Was Adonis Murdered, and The Sibyll in Her Grave. Since I'd mentioned liking one Caudwell, adrian_turtle lent me The Shortest Way to Hades to read on the train; I got the other two from the library. These are all the same sort of thing: somewhere between comedy of manners and cozy mystery story. I liked Thus Was Adonis Murdered best of the three, but I think that was more about my mood when I read each than about differences in the books, though Caudwell makes good use of the back and forth between Venice and London, and a minor character who invents a sick relative rather than tell her jealous husband that she is doing an (entirely respectable and non-romantic) errand for a friend on short notice. Caudwell does have a certain fondness for endings that aren't going to lead to court cases, perhaps because that would break the light-hearted civil litigation tone of focusing on young barristers and their foibles. Caudwell also seems well aware of some of the dark sides of romantic love.

James White, The Genocidal Healer. We have this in a two-book edition with Code Blue: Emergency, which I read last month. The two definitely go together: this takes place very soon after the other, and refers repeatedly to the events in the first book. It would stand on its own, but Code Blue: Emergency would suffer from being read second. It's fun, not terribly deep, but a good read.