A profanely sacred history lesson that vacillates between monster one-liners and carefully articulated deep thoughts.... Wald...is your only plausible tour guide, capable of illuminating both the blunt simplicity and fraught complexity, the cheerful frivolity and deadly severity of it all. –Rob Harvilla,
Spin MagazineLike yo mama - short but thick, a good trick, and easy to get all the way through. –
Harper's MagazineThe author's affection and respect for this strange, unheralded current of folk culture shine through every word of his book. –
Washington PostA lively and engaging history of the oral insult game... Wald is a respected historian of American music and has authoritatively mastered (and clearly summarizes) the vast research on the Dozens. –
San Francisco ChronicleThis 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... 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. –Terry Teachout,
ArtsJournalThe dozens is the most ephemeral and most contextual of the black verbal traditions, hence the hardest to get a handle on. The origins of blues, toasts and dozens, even the sources of the names are all lost in time. But after reading Elijah Wald's superbly researched and splendidly written book, no one will have any doubt what this important tradition is and means. –Bruce Jackson, author of
Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African-American Narrative Poetry from the Oral TraditionFascinating and groundbreaking all the way through. –
Buffalo NewsThis book-length study of sexualized insults makes for colorful reading and will appeal especially to anyone interested in forms of cultural expression that are considered obscene or subject to censorship. –
Library JournalThis has got to be the dirtiest scholary book ever! –Susan McClary, author of
Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and SexualityA pleasure to read from front to back, and Wald's vast knowledge of blues repertory allows him to make connections between songs themselves and between blues and other genres that employ the dozens. The many quotations from dozens exchanges make for colorful reading (Wald himself censors nothing), Wald's prose is consistently entertaining, the pace is brisk without sacrificing detail, and the breadth of sources ensures that every reader will come away with new information. –Sandra Jean Graham,
The Bulletin of the Society for American Music
