Learning A Language Can Be Fun and Funny

Name: Learning A Language Can Be Fun and Funny
Author: Ron Deigh
ISBN: 978-0-595-53361-9

by Ron Deigh ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 19, 2009

Heartwarming yet at times amateurish; serves best to remind Americans who have studied German of the pleasures and pains...

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In his memoir, a veterinarian for the U.S. Army relates his humorous struggle to master the local language while stationed in Germany.

With only a couple community college courses in German behind him, U.S. Army veterinarian Deigh found himself stationed in Germany. The shock of encountering what German was like out of the classroom led to a series of “Lessons”—vignettes of his experiences learning how the German language was used in the real world. Traversing Germany from Bremerhaven to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Deigh encountered odd idioms and nearly unintelligible dialects. In picturesque towns like Heidelberg, Rothenburg, and Nürnberg, Deigh mixed with the locals, found a girlfriend and wife, and overcame repeated stumbles—from confusing Staubsauger (vacuum cleaner) and Hubschrauber (helicopter) to realizing that a mere reflexive pronoun separates “undress” (sich umziehen) from “move house” (umziehen). Eventually, though, he arrived at a complete grasp of the language. The virtue of author Deigh’s debut effort is that it uses humor to describe encounters with a language that many Americans consider to be mostly humorless. For instance, a passage on the regional use of “gel” is amusing yet edifying. For those who have struggled with German, whether as a student or traveler, this book is a bit of nostalgia for common encounters with a language that is tightly structured and subtly nuanced. Entertaining though it is, this personal book is for family and friends more so than the general public. Punctuation and spelling errors are excessive, and the author’s command of German grammar is not impeccable. “Der Dame” is dative, not accusative. Likewise, he mistakenly says GmbH (meaning Inc. or LLC) is “Gesellschaft mit beshränkter”—not beschränkte—“Haftung.” However, perhaps to make up for the oversight, he proposes an amusing acronym for GmbH: “Geh mal Bier holen” (go get some beer). Grüss Gott should nevertheless have an umlaut, and in “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” it’s “four and twenty blackbirds,” not “one and twenty.” And that’s in English.

Heartwarming yet at times amateurish; serves best to remind Americans who have studied German of the pleasures and pains they share.

Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-595-53361-9

Page Count: 96

Publisher: iUniverse

Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)