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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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