by Ilan Stavans ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2005
Delicious little essays of powerful intellectual curiosity.
Charming, loose-fitting essays about the sublime and silly pleasures of reading the dictionary.
Mexican-American Stavans (On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language, 2002, etc.) is an enormously personable writer, deeply read without letting on that he’s also an academic (Latino American and Latino Culture/Amherst). His essays probe with a light touch his quarry as a “dictionary hunter,” first prompted by his father’s gift of Appleton’s New English-Spanish and Spanish-English Dictionary when Stavans first moved to New York from Mexico in 1985. With it, he read Moby-Dick. He believes a dictionary’s function is to “build character,” and indeed his essay “Pride and Prejudice” mentions many of the lexicographers over the ages who have attempted to impart this very quality to their readers: Aristophanes of Byzantium and his first Lexeis; John Baret’s work of 1573; Samuel Johnson; the Encyclopeadists; Noah Webster; and the editors of the towering Oxford English Dictionary, just to name a few. Stavans includes some fine scholarship in Arabic and Hispanic dictionaries, as well. In “The Invention of Love,” he delineates how definitions of love (in different language dictionaries) help define a culture, while “The Zebra and the Swear Word” explores hilariously erroneous information given by dictionaries, such as the definition for day offered by the modern Real Academia Espanola as “the time the Sun takes to apparently circle the Earth.” And where, he wonders, are the swear words in the OED—words everybody uses but lexicographers are still embarrassed by? (There’s a nice catalogue of them.) “In the Land of Lost Words,” Stavans rues the rejection by dictionaries of such spectacular vernacular words as the Mexican street term for kitsch, rascuachismo, the remembrance of which affects Stavans with its elastic, ambivalent connotations. In “Dr. Johnson’s Visit,” he imagines receiving the great 18th-century lexicographer in his home and showing him his shelf of Cervantes translations—English, he notes proudly, was the first language the great author’s work was translated into.
Delicious little essays of powerful intellectual curiosity.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-55597-419-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
Share your opinion of this book
More by Linda Elovitz Marshall
BOOK REVIEW
by Linda Elovitz Marshall & Ilan Stavans ; illustrated by Maria Mola
BOOK REVIEW
edited by Ilan Stavans
BOOK REVIEW
by Ilan Stavans
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Charlayne Hunter-Gault
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
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
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.