A delightfully sprightly and pun-laden history.
The history of a much-maligned punctuation mark.
In her first book, Hazrat notes that many writers have warned against using the exclamation point because it “provides cheap emphasis.” As the author notes, it “grabs our attention, whether we want it to or not,“and it exists in nearly every language. Early civilizations developed a system of signs—comma, colon, period, other punctuation marks came later—to help us understand the anatomy of sentences. In 1399, a Florentine lawyer and politician combined the dot and apostrophe, but its use was inconsistent. The “earliest mentions” of the exclamation point first appeared in English in 1551, and Ben Jonson’s 1765 Dictionary definition increased its influence. After a discussion of the ups and downs of tonal punctuation over time and grammar’s role in punctuation, Hazrat turns to Anton Chekhov’s story “The Exclamation Point.” She gleefully notes that in 45 of Elmore Leonard’s novels, there are only 49 of them. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children has 2,131, and Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities 2,400! Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea contains only one. Hazrat offers up a lot of punctuation trivia as well as information about the other marks, including the “infamous interrobang,” which is “not really a new mark at all, but rather two old ones squeezed together.” Hazrat also looks at Richard Artschwager’s sculpture Exclamation Point; he called it the “prince of punctuation.” Theodor Adorno likened the mark to a “soundless clashing of cymbals.” Hazrat notes the preponderance of the exclamation point in comic books, poster art, and political advertising. The author notes with chagrin Donald Trump’s “proclivity for the frenetic use of !” and follows its role in the digital world. “Among all glyphs,” she writes, the bold mark is “most available, and most versatile, the most recognisable and most ironic.” In the end, its job is to “attend to admiration” and “point out wonder.”
A delightfully sprightly and pun-laden history.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781567927870
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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