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
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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
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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