An ardent, spirited look at what is increasingly considered the world’s language.
An exploration of the English language via the study of specific words that have “gone global.”
As a result of English’s increasing worldwide dominance, there has been a recent surge of interest in its historical transformations and global impact. Dunton-Downer (co-author: Essential Shakespeare Handbook, 2004) contributes to this growing genre with a detailed investigation of the origins and global reach of more than 30 English words. For example, readers might be surprised to discover that the word bikini has a somewhat dubious lexical history connected to atom-bomb testing, while the ancestry of disco can be traced to an Indo-European word meaning “to pronounce solemnly.” In addition to etymologies, the author looks at the story and “personality” that each word acquires as it travels through time and often across continents. In the discussion of the word robot, for example, readers will learn about the Czech brothers who not only coined the word but were also strong opponents of Nazi Germany. Other words or phrases surveyed by Dunton-Downer include jazz, cocktail, blog, taxi, penthouse and safari. The author also delves into the English language’s turbulent past and myriad influences, such as the Norman Conquest and the subsequent influx of French words in the English lexicon. Although she briefly addresses the possible negative consequences of English’s increasing ubiquity, including the potential for more widespread language extinction, the author generally sidesteps the ongoing linguistic-political debates in favor of a more exuberant and humorous celebration of this particular language’s ascendancy and mutability. In the final chapter, Dunton-Downer makes predictions about how the language could spread and change in the future, including the acquisition of more words from Chinese and Arabic.
An ardent, spirited look at what is increasingly considered the world’s language.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7665-8
Page Count: 356
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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