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A "bootleg bonnet" is a black felt hat used to strain the fresh brew into a barrel. The term "100 proof was originally known as "gunpowder proof because the British found that whisky with about 50% alcohol, when mixed with gunpowder, would burn with a steady blue flame. Moonshining is not a thing of the past, either. As late as 1972, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms destroyed more than 2,000 illicit stills, and admits it barely scratched the surface of the trade.
As to what "white lightning" really tastes like, opinions differ. Irvin S. Cobb compared a swig to swallowing a lighted kerosene lamp. A North Carolina moonshiner says simply: "Hits a blamed ugly drink." And then there is Colonel Leland DeVore, whose throat involuntarily contracts whenever he thinks of moonshine: "I hear, as if from far away, the gagging whisper of a long-lost friend whose favorite saying was 'Vile stuff—I wish I had a barrel of it!' "
THE MEMORY BOOK by HARRY LORAYNE and JERRY LUCAS 237 pages. Stein & Day. $7.95.
This book is a recipe for madness. Common sense and ancient wisdom agree that the secret of a happy and productive inner life is to forget as much as possible—forget time's winged chariot, forget that your child needs orthodontia, forget that you have forgotten your mother's birthday, forget that the drink you hold as you watch the evening news (which itself must be forgotten) will demolish a billion brain cells.
Harry Lorayne, a mentalist and magician, and Jerry Lucas, the 6-ft. 8-in. basketball player and mnemonist who just retired from the New York Knicks, have devised a pernicious never-fail system for remembering everything—from the names, faces and phone numbers of everyone in a TV audience of 400 people to, in Lucas' case, the essential contents of an issue of TIME.
Reading the book suggests that the system may work as advertised. The basketball player and what's-his-name unseal the reader's memory with a Tinker Toy assortment of mnemonic links and pegs. Assume, they say, that you want to memorize a random list of ten words: airplane, tree, envelope, earring, bucket, thing, basketball, salami, star, nose. Form a series of visual incongruities—a tree riding in an airplane, say, and then another picture of envelopes growing on trees, and another one in which millions of earrings fly out of the envelopes, and so on. The more grotesque and childish the mental picture, the stronger and more indelible the link.
Only in one area does the book seem misguided. "The French phrase rien de grave is idiomatic for. . . 'It's nothing serious.' Associate 'Ran the grave' to 'It's nothing' in some ridiculous way and you've memorized it." Yes, you have, and in a flawless Kankakee accent.
A RANDOM WALK IN SCIENCE Compiled by R.L. WEBER 206 pages. Illustrated. Crane, Russak. $12.50.