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WORDFLEX TOUCH DICTIONARY

A welcome addition to a logophile’s arsenal—the last word, we learn, coming from an Arabic phrase meaning “house of...

An iPad-only app that displays networks of word associations in trees that unfold into branches and sub-branches of meaning.

Words have meanings—and sometimes subtle ones. Words also live in communities that a “fancy-pants” (“superior or high-class in a pretentious way”) would call a “semantic domain.” Playing within that domain is the strength of this well-made app, which leverages the power of the Oxford English Dictionary to provide definitions and pronunciations. It also leverages mind-mapping principles (as found in software such as iThoughts and PersonalBrain) to show where a word lives within its community: Type “eat” into the search box, for instance, and up floats a cloud of words that includes the phrases “eaten up,” “what’s eating you,” “eat like a horse” and “eat someone out of house and home,” among other possibilities. Tap on the boldface term “eat,” and up springs a diagram with paths to noun, verb, phrases and phrasal verbs; follow the verb to the general idea “consume,” and up spring “snack,” “graze” and “nosh” along one branch (the informal one, that is), with possibilities that include “scarf,” “snarf,” “ingurgitate” (rare, the app helpfully notes) and “stuff one’s face.” If readers need a record of this groaning board of synonymy, then with a tap, an 1100 x 1576 pixel poster can be generated for printing, emailing or even posting on Facebook. The relationships among synonyms, antonyms, parts of speech and the like offer endless avenues of exploration; add to that the ability to reorder trees by dragging and dropping, and the word lover who chomps into this treat may never emerge. The user interface is both beautiful and unobtrusive, and it is easy to add words to a list of favorites, as well as to keep track of one’s journey through the rabbit hole by way of a history function. 

A welcome addition to a logophile’s arsenal—the last word, we learn, coming from an Arabic phrase meaning “house of industry,” though this is a lot more fun than all that.

Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2012

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Schematix

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

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THE NIGHTINGALE

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

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