Limericks

Isaac Asimov, one of the world’s best-selling authors, a scientist, academic, romantic, and original thinker, here jousts and jests with his old opponent in the war of the words, John Ciardi. Ciardi, of course, is a poet, world authority on and premier translator of Dante, teacher, critic, and formidable manufacturer and wielder of the word-weapon. Hurling limericks at each other, a dozen at a clip, they charge from the lists (the list includes a gross of limericks by each). It is a brilliant confrontation in one of the English language’s oldest and most demandingly rigid traditions.