Although Moore sometimes sees a bit too much significance in the differences, her brisk, self-effacing style is appealing.
An author who grew up in Florida and now lives in London debuts with a breezy, and sometimes-irreverent, disquisition on the significance of certain slang locutions on both sides of the pond.
Moore elects to follow what has become a popular organizational principle—what could be called the ten-objects-that-tell-Texas-history model. She examines 31 expressions (each with its own chapter) that, in most cases, exist on both sides of the Atlantic but often mean something different to native speakers. Sometimes, the differences are striking and illuminating. Early on, Moore explains why she focuses on England—not the British Isles, not the United Kingdom. Some of the locutions readers will expect: bloody, Yankee and way out (England’s meaning: exit). But others are surprising and sometimes revelatory. The English term brolly, for example (umbrella), permits her to expatiate upon the differences in attitudes about the weather (the English expect lousy weather; Americans grouse about it). She uses the English term mufti (ordinary dress) to discuss why the English are more comfortable with school uniforms than Americans are. Very early in the text, Moore shows how the word quite varies in meaning. In America, a sentence like She is quite lovely indicates high praise; in England, the term is more an expression that indicates she’s really not all that lovely. Occasionally, Moore weighs in on touchy cultural issues. The word partner, for example, has in England no connotation of homosexuality. She also enjoys employing some occasional potty humor. She mentions that neither the English nor the Americans are comfortable using the word toilet in conversation, so we’ve both developed different sets of euphemisms. She ends the section with this: “[I]f you don’t give a shit what anyone thinks, you know what word you can use.”
Although Moore sometimes sees a bit too much significance in the differences, her brisk, self-effacing style is appealing.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59240-885-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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