An informative, transformative trip into the mysterious, mutating, magical thicket of English.
Linguist Crystal (How Language Works, 2006, etc.), whose learned disquisitions have sometimes bewildered readers, lightens up with an inviting text combining the best features of travel writing, memoir and scholarship.
On assignment for the BBC’s “Voices” project, which aimed to record and celebrate Britain’s many dialects and accents, the author traveled around the United Kingdom, beginning and ending in Wales. His wry humor is evident throughout, as in a passage about the origin of assembly-of-animal expressions like “a murder of crows”—among the new ones Crystal suggests is “a sulk of teenagers.” Loosely arranged into “a linguistic travelogue,” his account centers on the various communities he visited. Though the poet Shelley once claimed an assassin attacked him in Porthmadog, Crystal’s own trip there was uneventful. While many Brits find the Birmingham accent ugly, the author notes that foreigners often describe it as melodious. In the town of Hay, Crystal explored its many antiquarian bookshops and visited the castle once occupied by the man who became the model for Shakespeare’s Falstaff. Driving out of Lichfield, birthplace of Samuel Johnson and David Garrick, the author thought of an earlier trip to San Francisco, and the text segues into an exploration of the differences between American and British English. On the same drive, a straight stretch of road recalled the similarly rectilinear Piotrkowaska Street in Lodz, Poland’s second-largest city, whose unconventional use of English in various shop signs Crystal discusses. He goes on to examine the 1960s TV show The Prisoner, Henry Higgins, Lady Godiva, the emergence of standard spelling, punctuation and usage, curious sayings (see the title), English around the globe, language games (an amusing retelling of Hamlet includes only words beginning with h) and the changes in vocabulary and spelling in the American editions of Harry Potter novels.
An informative, transformative trip into the mysterious, mutating, magical thicket of English.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59020-061-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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