A practical, nonboring companion for writers aiming to hone their style.
A self-described "language enthusiast" analyzes memorable sentences.
Woods, author of English Grammar for Dummies, among dozens of other books on writing and literature, offers an upbeat, informative guide for writers and readers, focused on the power of sentences. Each of the 25 chapters highlights one exemplary sentence, supplemented by many others that illustrate the same technique, drawn from a capacious range of sources, including Virginia Woolf, Stephen King, Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan, the King James Bible, and even ads for potato chips, candy, and soda. Woods avoids literary jargon and carefully explains terms that might be unfamiliar to nonspecialist readers. Looking at structure, for example, she identifies several interesting constructions—parallelism, reversed sentences, questions, for example—and “crossed sentences,” which she calls “the neon signs of the sentence world. They attract attention.” Her primary example is John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” and she also cites Groucho Marx: “Money will not make you happy, and happy will not make you money.” Some sentences, notes the author, succeed through surprise, such as Lucille Ball’s “The secret to staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.” A section on diction examines verbs, tone, word shifts (Gertrude Stein’s “There is no there there” is one example), and inventive coinage. Poetry appears most frequently in chapters on sound (onomatopoeia, repetition, and matching sounds) and visual presentation. A section on connection/comparison analyzes use of the first person and second person, synesthesia, and contrast—e.g., Neil Armstrong’s famous “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” A final section on “Extremes” focuses on unusually long “marathon sentences” and sentences that are marvels of concision, such as E.M. Forster’s “Only connect.” Each chapter ends with inventive writing exercises.
A practical, nonboring companion for writers aiming to hone their style.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00485-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Deep—and often hilarious—thoughts from wee ones.
Questioning the “popular depiction of children as adorable idiots.”
“What should you do on the last day of your life?” It’s a question Socrates might have pondered. In reality, it’s a question posed by a young child—one of the many earnest queries asked by preschoolers in this whimsical and sometimes profound collection. Manguso, the author of nine books, among them the novels Liars and Very Cold People, included questions from her son that she wrote down in his early years. She also solicited entries from other parents on social media. “Before I started spending time around children,” Manguso writes in a preface, “I thought that people who paid close attention to these simpletons were people who had decided not to be interesting anymore. I thought that people found their own children fascinating simply because they’d been biologically hypnotized into loving them. Once I learned what children are really like, I immediately wanted to create an artifact of their weird eloquence.” Manguso divides these questions into a handful of categories; People, Animals, and Big Things are a few of them. The questions reflect the curiosity, thoughtfulness, and innocence of these “dizzyingly fast-learning engines of art and experiment”: “What do clouds taste like?” “Did horses know they were in a war?” “How do you get the meat off the animal without hurting it?” Each question is paired with imaginative and playful drawings by Finck, a New Yorker cartoonist. “When the baby is born, how do the parents know its name?” The accompanying drawing shows a mother cradling a tiny baby who is waving to her. A thought bubble above his head reads, “Hi. I’m George.” This is a book that will appeal to anyone who has raised humans or is thinking of raising humans—or is a human.
Deep—and often hilarious—thoughts from wee ones.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733622
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A grand treat for musicophiles and an entertaining walk through world music, leading readers to countless sounds and styles.
The noted record producer, sound engineer, and musicologist surveys the many sounds the world has to offer.
The title is from Paul Simon, whom Boyd, author of White Bicycles, met back in the 1960s when Simon was in the process of making a Martin Carthy treatment of the old folksong “Scarborough Fair” his own. But borrowing is the nature of the game, and musicians are often a step behind the times. Even as Simon, enamored of Zulu music, was recording Graceland, “on home ground, world music’s biggest sellers—Le Mystère des Voix Bulgaires, Buena Vista Social Club, Ladysmith Black Mambazo—were considered old-fashioned, even reactionary.” The kids, in other words, weren’t listening. Instead, hip-hop reigns in Ghana, the Rolling Stones in Rio, and heavy metal in Hungary—though Boyd adds, “even the hardest-core Hungarian heavy metal headbanger will acknowledge a fondness for Muzsikás, Márta, and táncház,” traditional sounds that world music–loving hipsters began to eat up courtesy of Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, and other explorers. Boyd’s leanings are catholic, his enthusiasms varied, and he engagingly explores how Ry Cooder gathered the traditional Cuban musicians who made up Buena Vista, Herb Alpert scrapped light jazz for mariachi, and so on. Readers should prepare for a flood of disparate data that adds up to something more than trivia: Argentine bassist Leopoldo Thompson “may have been the first anywhere to deliver percussive slaps to this normally bowed instrument”; Elvis Presley was crazy for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and thus “Dean Martin’s Italianate crooning is all over Elvis’s vocal style”; “Wimoweh” owes its title to “Pete Seeger’s mishearing of uyimbube”; and much more. It’s marvelous, sometimes careening adventure, as Boyd darts from one musical obsession to another.
A grand treat for musicophiles and an entertaining walk through world music, leading readers to countless sounds and styles.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798988670025
Page Count: 760
Publisher: ZE Books
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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