Comprehensive report by veteran science writer Davis (Mapping the Code, 1990, etc.) on the glories and mysteries of language. Evidence that animals can talk is, Davis says, ``scant at best'': Language remains a distinctively human trait and perhaps our crowning achievement, and it may play a key role in the creation of the sense of an ``I,'' by which we know ourselves and the world. According to Davis, language is at least 100,000 years old, although its origins remain misty. We do know that all extant languages are equally complex (no so-called ``primitive'' language exists) and that all languages evolve—a process for which Davis uses English (the ``single most important spoken and written language'') as a fascinating case history, tracing how ``dramatic changes in vowel pronunciation'' turned Chaucer's English into the language spoken today. This sort of study arises from the blossoming of linguistics, which Davis traces from its origins in ancient Greece and India through the breakthrough work, in the 18th century, of Sir William Jones (who first noticed that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin are related) to the transformational grammar of Noam Chomsky, who perceives innate language structures in the mind. But minds require brains, and Davis explains in great detail how the brain stores and processes information, as well as how it produces language. It turns out that language abilities are spread throughout our gray matter and that, in multilingual people, different areas of the brain handle different languages. The stages of language acquisition in infants are also covered—from crying to gurgling to babbling to real talking (which begins at about one year). Seven appendices offer a bounty of language miscellany, from a pronunciation guide for phonetic symbols to a chart of Indo-European tongues. A first-rate overview of language from A to Z, and then some.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55972-206-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1993
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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