A humanistic approach to linguistics and a scintillating read. (source notes)
Canadian journalist Abley tracks with painstaking, intrepid care languages tottering on the edge of extinction, from Australia to Native America.
The aggressive incursion of English as the universal language of business, education, and entertainment has silenced many other tongues that formerly thrived in tight, regional pockets around the world. Here, the author valiantly sets out to unearth the existence of the most notable of these and record their decline or, in a few spectacular instances, their dogged resurrection. Of the 417 languages listed as “nearly extinct,” 138 are in Australia, and Abley begins his journey on the remote northern coast of this continent with the dwindling ancient tongue of Mati Ke, spoken by a handful of Aboriginal elders. The author repeatedly ponders two key questions: If all languages are created equal, each reflecting a distinct organization of one’s world, then do some simply deserve to die out? Why should we care about their loss? In northeastern Oklahoma, home to descendants of the powerful Creek Nation who speak Yuchi, Abley records the locals’ last-ditch attempts to keep alive their ancestral tongue in the face of their children’s apathy. Most dear to the author’s Welsh-descended heart is his chronicle of the grassroots revival of six Celtic languages, specifically Manx and Welsh, whose speakers displayed a bloody-minded tribalism despite the English decree that their languages were “doomed.” While militant practice of one’s native language might seem the only way to save it, Abley also offers the example of Provençal, the medieval troubadours’ tongue, which was revived by Frédéric Mistral in the 19th century, but lately has become mired in a contested civil debate about its spelling that just might sink it for good. Finally, Abley examines Yiddish as one language that has successfully transformed itself, thanks to vicissitudes of history, from a shameful, servile dialect to a modern holy tongue.
A humanistic approach to linguistics and a scintillating read. (source notes)Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-23649-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
An expert blend of musical and social history, illuminating one of the cultural cores of America's ``Gilded Age.'' In the 1880s, as accurately depicted in Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, the upper echelons of New York society flocked to Faust (a scene carefully retained in Martin Scorsese's recent film version). But by the 1890s, Wagner fever had overtaken America's most ardent opera patrons, and not in New York alone. This is the world that Horowitz (The Ivory Trade, 1990, etc.) reveals in his fascinating, gracefully written study of American Wagnerism. Currently executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, formerly a New York Times music critic, and a long-time student of the interplay between musical art and national culture, Horowitz orders his narrative around the parallel careers of the conductor Anton Seidl and the New York Tribune critic Henry Krehbiel. He evokes an era when issues of aesthetics and musical philosophy were the common currency of middle-class discussion. From the viewpoint of today's world, in which the column inches devoted to serious arts criticism in the daily papers have shrunk to virtually nothing, fin-de-siäcle America was, musically and intellectually, an enviably lively place. Wagner's works dominated the stage, and his music and ``ideas'' were the subject of passionate debate. To this extent, Horowitz proves his thesis that the ``Gay '90s'' were not the crass, lowbrow scene its detractors have claimed. One fascinating recurrent theme in this study is the positive impact of Wagnerism on emerging feminism at the turn of the century. It appears that a majority of American Wagnerites were women, and the idea of Brunnhilde (as well as the regal dramatic sopranos who portrayed her) fit neatly with the notion of the ``New Woman'' then sweeping the nation. A work of engrossing scholarship about an important, unjustly ignored slice of our artistic past.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-520-08394-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
As is to be expected from Lessing (The Real Thing; 1992, etc.), whose clear and always intelligent no-nonsense writing has explored subjects that transcend the commonplace, this first volume of her autobiography reflects all her remarkable strengths. The year of her birth, 1919, was auspicious neither for her parents in particular nor for the world in general. The ill-matched Taylers had married not out of love but out of a mutual need to expunge the horror of the recently ended world war, which had maimed Lessing's father both physically and mentally — he'd lost a leg in battle, but more important, be was embittered by what he considered Britain's poor treatment of her soldiers. Her mother, an able nurse, had lost a fiancÉ, and marriage now seemed to offer only the consolation of children. These disappointments, exacerbated by the harsh life in rural Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), where her family settled after a stint in Persia, would indelibly shape Lessing. She quarreled frequently with her mother, whose well-meaning strictures she resented; observed her father's despair and his failures as a settler-farmer; and resolved that she would not live like them — "I will not, I will not!" — even if it meant defying convention. Which she did, as she left her first husband and their two children for another man — Gottried Lessing; joined the local Communist Party in the midst of WW II "because of the spirit of the times, because of the Zeitgeist"; and then moved in 1949 permanently to London. Like so many bright and alienated provincials, Lessing found an escape in voracious reading. Though determined to be a writer, the consuming distractions of motherhood, wartime society, and political activities frustrated this ambition for a long time. Refreshingly, not a self-indulgent mea culpa, but a brutally frank examination of how Lessing became what she is — a distinguished writer, a woman who has lived life to the full, and a constant critic of cant.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017150-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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