A convincing argument for linguistic multiplicity.
A spirited celebration of a polyglot city.
Linguist Perlin, co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance and author of Intern Nation, makes a strong case for the need to support endangered, Indigenous, and primarily oral languages. Of more than 7,000 languages, he reports, more than half are likely to disappear over the next few centuries. Many survive in New York City, which the author portrays with abundant evidence as a city “of unprecedented linguistic diversity.” Besides offering an overview of New York’s linguistic history, Perlin follows dedicated, impassioned speakers of endangered languages from Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas who are each “trying to maintain or revitalize their languages” by compiling dictionaries, transcribing and translating recorded texts, and popularizing linguistic and cultural traditions. Among some 700 Seke speakers, for example, originally from five villages in the Mustang region of northern Nepal, more than 100 live (or have lived) in an apartment building in Brooklyn. For the last three years, Perlin has met regularly with one of them, either in Brooklyn or at ELA’s office, “gradually adding words, definitions, and examples to a dictionary-in-progress; homing in on single points of grammar; or carefully transcribing and translating a previously recorded text.” The other languages the author examines are Yiddish, now spoken mainly by Hasidim; Nahuatl, once the lingua franca of Mexico, with “a long and extraordinary history as a written language”; Wakhi, “an endangered Pamiri language spoken by around forty thousand people in the remote high mountain region where Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China converge”; N’ko, a writing system created in West Africa in 1949 that “unites Manding-language speakers from what is today Guinea, Mali, and Ivory Coast” and that has since spread globally; and Lenape, the language of Indigenous tribes in Manhattan. New York’s cultural richness, Perlin asserts, is nourished by languages.
A convincing argument for linguistic multiplicity.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780802162465
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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