by Rosemarie Ostler ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 12, 2015
Lively and revealing discussion of a battle that seems likely to continue as long as English is spoken.
Since Colonial times, Americans have taken grammar as a touchstone of social and educational status. Linguist and former librarian Ostler (Slinging Mud: Rude Nicknames, Scurrilous Slogans, and Insulting Slang from Two Centuries of American Politics, 2011, etc.) provides a history of the struggles over our language.
The author begins with Noah Webster, who, before compiling the first American dictionary, wrote a three-volume grammar text, arguing that the way Americans actually speak was the best foundation for the study of grammar. Unfortunately for Webster, Robert Lowth, an Anglican bishop and author of A Short Introduction to English Grammar, already occupied the high ground in the field of grammar textbooks. Lowth was among the first to pontificate against double negatives and ending sentences with prepositions, rules that remain dear to grammatical purists. Even more influential was Lindley Murray, whose grammar book became the standard during much of the 19th century. In those books, the battle lines were drawn, pitting Latinate rules against the study of vernacular speech. Ostler follows the skirmishes over the years, examining the growing influence of frontier Americans like Davy Crockett and Andrew Jackson. However, the sophisticated classes of New York and Boston carried more weight with those interested in improving their grammar. Even Abraham Lincoln had to contend with snobs who found his homespun anecdotes proof of his boorish origins. While subsequent generations learned to see the charms of Mark Twain and other vernacular writers, those with a claim to education still avoided split infinitives and shunned “ain’t” as the stain of ignorance. Practitioners of scientific linguistics, who strove to describe usage rather than prescribe rules, made few inroads with the way grammar was taught, and Webster’s Third International outraged purists by including “ain’t” and other substandard usages. The controversies that followed get full play, as Ostler (who clearly sympathizes with the descriptive camp) brings the “war of grammar” up to the present.
Lively and revealing discussion of a battle that seems likely to continue as long as English is spoken.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04612-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorkerstaff 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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales
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by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez
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by Howard Zinn
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