Provides some truly educative moments, glazed with a thick icing of self-regard.
Groundbreaking linguist Bickerton (Language and Species, 1990, etc.) summarizes his career, focusing on his efforts to understand the link between languages commonly called “pidgin” and “Creole.”
Now retired from the University of Hawaii, the author throughout his long career has challenged conventional thinking in scholarly monographs that have significantly altered our understanding of tongues previously characterized as inferior or bastardized. When a dominant, usually white force arrives in an area, sometimes bringing slaves from another part of the world, mutually incomprehensible languages collide. Bickerton demonstrates that the older generations of the indigenous group develop a pidgin version of the dominant group’s language. Their children, on the other hand, create and spread a Creole: a different language featuring complexities of grammar and syntax often unknown in the pidgin. Creoles all over the world appear to be quite similar in their deep structures, causing Bickerton to argue for the presence in all of us of an inherent language-generational capacity he calls a “bioprogram.” (He notes the obvious connections to Noam Chomsky’s theories.) To test his notion, the author has tried to obtain funding for a test on human subjects, with no success so far. In his text, a combination of memoir, treatise and thesis defense, the diction varies widely and wildly from gee-whiz informality to dense professional jargon comprehensible to fellow linguists but numbing for general readers. Bickerton is neither shy nor humble, several times ripping into academics he sees as hidebound pedants who need less sitzfleisch (the capacity for sitting on their butts in libraries) and more of what he possesses—the eagerness to go to bars and listen to actual people talk.
Provides some truly educative moments, glazed with a thick icing of self-regard.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8090-2817-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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