Word: encyclopedia
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...encyclopedia she turned to next was not too helpful; printed before a slew of African nations won independence in the 60s, it still discussed Gabon as a colony. "What it did say was not very comforting," she recalls. "Something about a prevalence of snakes and large cats...
Birds do it, and so do bees and even educated fleas. But human beings are the only ones who make money writing about it, and it is the Wallaces of course - father, daughter, mother and son-who have reduced the practice to its final and most lucrative essence: an encyclopedia of what our celebrated betters, lessers, do between the sheets. How was Napoleon in bed? Or Victor Hugo, Eva Perón or Virginia Woolf? Just ask the Wallaces. (The short answers: terrible, terrific, often and rarely...
This description jibes perfectly with Grass's own fictional methods, particularly in The Tin Drum, a sprawling, picaresque vision of a later war. The Meeting at Telgte is considerably shorter and less ambitious than its famous predecessor, much more an elegy than an encyclopedia. But for all its brevity, the novel fleshes out serious old questions about the place of literature in the lives of nations. Grass allows his imaginary meeting to end on a note of ineffectuality. The inn burns down, and with it a peace proposal that the poets composed: "And so, what would in any case...
...AUDUBON SOCIETY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NORTH AMERICAN BIRDS by John K. Terres...
Terres' monumental effort will be in spiring poets, librarians, astronauts and lovers long after the work's scientific value is exhausted and serious birders have moved on with notebooks and binoculars to newer texts. The Encyclopedia is literature rather than guide. Terres' observations of our nearest wild-animal neigh bors offer an anthropomorphic comfort, and make the mysteries of Carl Sagan's black holes in other galaxies seem remote indeed...