JUMBO'S HIDE, ELVIS'S RIDE, AND THE TOOTH OF BUDDHA

A bodacious artifactual romp through history. In this sequel to Lucy’s Bones, Sacred Stones, and Einstein’s Brain (1995), Rachlin examines similar legendary relics like Galileo’s Middle Finger (an inscription reads: “It pointed to new stars . . . and was able to reach what Titans could never attain”); The Tooth of Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama’s miracle-making remnant from his cremation); and Freud’s Couch (which, like the head shrink himself, narrowly escaped destruction by the Nazis). Whether they are as weighty as the Magna Carta or as weightless as an early draft of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” Rachlin provides a dating, description, and story of each artifact and its impact. The relics can be as ancient as the Stone of Scone (the biblical Jacob’s “pillow” used in the coronation throne of British kings since the 1300s) or as recent as the Gun That Killed John Lennon. More than half the artifacts are American, involving figures from the first president (George Washington’s Schoolboy Copybooks) to the King (Elvis Presley’s Purple Cadillac). While most entries are properly reverential, some are revisionist. In a time when historic baseballs are auctioned for fortunes, Rachlin challenges Abner Doubleday’s baseball in Cooperstown, the American pastime’s Holy Grail. He reveals that “all conjecture about the ball is just that.” The ball’s dubious link to Doubleday depended on the testimony of a witness committed to an insane asylum. Tracing America’s sport to the British game of rounders moves Rachlin to conclude that “what [a relic] means to people may sometimes be more important than its authenticity.” His miscellany is thus as much about the myths and memories we value as about the objects that enshrine them. Most of Rachlin’s 42 relics are fascinating enough to make his survey the literary equivalent of visits to a Ripley’s exhibit and a wax museum. (73 b&w illustrations)