Nonfiction Notes

Emily Dickinson's famous reclusivemess essentially meant that family property marked the boundaries of her world. The Dickinsons of Amherst takes as one of its subjects the relationship between the poet's domestic space—the Homestead, where she lived, and the Evergreens, which was built for her brother—and her interior creative life. Documentary photographer and Amherst resident Jerome Liebling's hauntingly beautiful photographs (138 in color) of gates, bedrooms, family portraits and Dickinson's ghostly white dress are complemented by essays by three prominent Dickinson scholars, including one by Christopher Benfey (Emily Dickinson: Lives of a Poet) that allies the art of the photographer to the art of the poet. (Univ. Press of New England, $55 220p ISBN 1-58465-068-0; Nov. 8) From the politics of the dinner table to the politics of Washington, D.C., Linda Donn (Freud and Jung: Years of Friendship and Loss) probes the people and the relationships in one of America's most important families in The Roosevelt Cousins: Growing Up Together, 1882–1942. With chapters like "Shifting Alliances" and "Schisms," the volume seems to suggest that the cousins sometimes behaved more like warring nations than relatives. In this careful and serious study, Donn calls into question popular myths about Eleanor's mousiness and FDR's relationship to his mother, and provides plenty of insight into a clan that played out its family dramas on a national stage. (Knopf, $30 256p ISBN 0-679-44637-0;110 illus.; Nov. 4)

For lovers of the intricacies of language comes an anthology of the best writing from Verbatim: The Language Quarterly, which has been investigating, debating, and dissecting English for almost 30 years. Erin McKean, the magazine's editor since 1997, has collected lively essays on popular linguistics, dictionaries and the men and women who make them, English etymology and usage, and, of course, obscenity. From a consideration of "student bloopers" to a disquisition on the nature of slang, these thoughtful and often humorous offerings provide insight into the sophisticated systems of human communication in language that's appropriately fresh and, thankfully, jargon-free. (Harcourt/Harvest, $14 paper 320p ISBN 0-15-601209-X)