by Guy Deutscher ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2010
Entertainingly executed with a near-erotic passion for language.
The author of The Unfolding of Language (2005) returns to address questions about how our languages shape our perceptions and ideas.
Deutscher enjoys himself in this romp through research and theory. Although Hebrew is his native language, he uses English artfully—and playfully—to make points, provide examples and slay sacred cattle, nowhere more entertainingly than in his systematic dispelling of the airy theories of American linguist Benjamin Whorf, who argued (but could not prove) that languages prevent their speakers from having certain thoughts. Deutscher begins by showing that the nature-vs.-nurture argument, though it has long raged in his discipline, is a straw dog—the reality is that nature and nurture shape language. To illustrate, he examines three major concepts: color (why are Homer’s color descriptions so odd?), orientation (some languages identify locations that are egocentric, others geocentric, others both) and gender (some languages employ gender heavily, others little or not at all). The author swiftly summarizes the theory and research in each area, then shows that for each, current thinking seems to have settled on a fundamental principle: “culture enjoys freedom within restraints.” He does not accept the notion of “universal grammar” fiercely advanced by Noam Chomsky, nor does he believe that culture determines all. He also takes Steven Pinker to task, declaring that his “facts are hardly quibbleable with [but] his environmental determinism is unconvincing.” Of great interest is Deutscher’s explanation of Guugu Yimithirr, the language of the Australian aboriginal tribe that contributed kangaroo to English. Guugu Yimithirr is completely geocentric in its orientation, meaning that speakers offer even the simplest of directions with compass references, not with personal ones—i.e., the chair is not on your left; it is in the northwest corner of the room. Deutscher also writes about how all languages are manifestly not equally complex, about what sorts of information a language compels its speakers to communicate (verb tenses in English) and about how gendered nouns can supply poets with richer metaphors.
Entertainingly executed with a near-erotic passion for language.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8195-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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by David Hajdu ; illustrated by John Carey
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by John Carey
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by John Carey
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