An engrossing introduction to the riches of Chinese that should delight casual language mavens and more experienced speakers...
The world’s most widely spoken language—and one of the most daunting to learn—has its idiosyncrasies dissected in this primer.
Hung (Practical Ophthalmology, 2016, etc.), a retinal surgeon, amateur linguist, and author, is fluent in English, Mandarin Chinese, and his native Cantonese dialect and thus well-qualified to interpret the foibles of Chinese for English speakers. Chief among these is a fiendishly difficult writing system that uses characters symbolizing ideas rather than the simple alphabets other languages use to phonetically spell out the sounds of words. Hung shows how Chinese characters evolved over thousands of years from rudimentary drawings of the sun, trees, rivers, and the like into complicated, abstract tangles of lines only vaguely connected to the concepts they signify. Chinese speakers learn to read and write by memorizing thousands of ornate characters, a task that significantly slows their attainment of literacy compared to the speed at which students learn alphabetic writing. Other maddening quirks of Chinese that he deftly explores are its tonal semantics and its relatively small number of phonemes, which make for a bewildering number of homonyms. The word ma, Hung notes, can mean mother, horse, hemp, or to scold depending on the tone of voice, while whole paragraphs can be written using nothing but the syllable “shi.” The author continues with a beguiling tour of China’s linguistic culture, from the folktales behind cryptic Chinese aphorisms—“Ban’s door, display axe” is an injunction to not show off one’s meager skills—to hilariously wrong-headed Chinese-to-English translations in signage. (He finds restaurant menus touting such delicacies as “binaural infected cucumber” and “grilled sexual harassment.”) Hung’s treatise blends wide-ranging, sophisticated, but very readable linguistic analysis with insightful reflections on his personal experience navigating three radically different languages, all packaged in graceful prose that wears its erudition lightly.
An engrossing introduction to the riches of Chinese that should delight casual language mavens and more experienced speakers alike.Pub Date: April 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-92495-2
Page Count: 238
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
