BOOK

Elijah Wald, The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama (Oxford, $24.95). This impeccably researched study of the classic black insult game may be the funniest work of serious scholarship ever published–and the one that will give newspaper reviewers the most trouble, since virtually every paragraph of is studded with obscenities of the highest possible voltage. That said, The Dozens is a superlative piece of work, which won’t surprise anyone who’s read any of Elijah Wald’s earlier books. If I ran the world, I’d give him a MacArthur (TT).