WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Bruce Wexler's "The Wild West Catalogue" (Running Press) is a coffee table book full of great pictures and a lot of good information compiled in encyclopedia form. There are sections on cowboys, gunfighters, food (including recipes), Native Americans and so forth. Each section has both period and new photographs. I was particularly interested in the section on the guns of the Old West, with very nice photos of a wide variety of museum-quality armaments. (Can guns that are 120 years old still be fired?)
There's also a section on the West in popular culture, which takes in everything from Louis L'Amour to Hopalong Cassidy, and there are some great shots of western toys from the '50s and '60s, which would set you back a week's pay if you were lucky enough to find them on eBay.
Great browsing, and not bad for reference, either.
A retreat to pop culture of a different era is contained in Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," a wonderful book in which Wolfe's kinetic, sometimes overhyped prose found its ideal subject — Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters.
Mountain Girl, where are you?
In the Pipeline...
Viking will publish "Odd Man Out," a memoir by Matt McCarthy of his time playing minor-league ball in Provo, Utah, alongside such stars of the future as Prince Fielder. McCarthy didn't think he was good enough to play in the major leagues and was in any case more interested in attending Harvard Medical School, from which he has recently graduated; but he thought that playing minor-league baseball would be fun to do for a year.
"Odd Man Out" will appear just in time for opening day.
Mike Browning's Word of the Week. . . ochlophobia: an irrational fear of crowds.
Scott Eyman writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: seyman AT pbpost.com