Lighthearted and occasionally witty.
A merry look at competitive wordplay.
Punning may not seem a viable path to winning any kind of championship, but Fast Company editor and reporter Berkowitz (co-author: You Blew It!: An Awkward Look at the Many Ways in Which You’ve Already Ruined Your Life, 2015) discovered a new world of competition when he first attended Punderdome, where punsters with monikers like Punky Brewster, Forest Wittyker, Words Nightmare, and Black Punther gather to outwit one another. That experience led him to the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships, “the Olympics of pun competitions,” held in Austin, Texas, and many other such events throughout the country. English, Berkowitz learned, “is uncontestably the best language to pun in” because it has the largest vocabulary, with many words drawn from hundreds of other languages. Only English allows for a pun like, “Paris is a site for soirees.” The author defines four kinds of puns: homophonic, with words that sound the same but have different meanings; homographic, with words “spelled the same but sound[ing] different”; homonymic, with words spelled and sounding the same; and portmanteau, with words that combine two other words to mean something different. The book is filled with examples of puns, many of which do not seem funny on the page; some, as Berkowitz readily admits, are simply bad. A great pun, he writes, “is its own reword. A mediocre pun, though, is just awkword.” The author chronicles his interviews with a host of punsters, investigates the history of punning across cultures, and discusses his experience at the North East Texas Humor Research Conference, “among Earth’s least funny places.” Linguists and other experts hardly enlighten him about what makes a good punster, but he does learn from contestants that practice is important. He also reproduces a digital exchange on the topic of weather, which elicits such remarks as, “spoken like a raining pun champion” and “I’m losing my cloudt.”
Lighthearted and occasionally witty.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-249560-0
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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