A sobering, urgent call for action to save a thousand tongues while we can.
A trilingual journalist explores the loss of linguistic diversity around the globe.
“In the next one hundred years, up to half the world’s languages will die.” So warns Smith Galer, who grew up in the shadow of a likely victim, a local version of Italian spoken by her grandmother that she called simply dialët. Smith Galer identifies a common pattern in immigrant communities, one that she shares: A grandparent is monolingual in language A, a parent is bilingual in languages A and B, a child is monolingual in language B—and language A loses speakers, too often to the point of extinction. As she writes, it’s not by accident that zones of linguistic diversity correlate strongly to zones of biodiversity, nor that as critically endangered habitats disappear, languages disappear with them. There are numerous mechanisms for this disappearance, for, she adds, “something is disappearing them.” That something is often the dominance of leviathan national and international languages such as English, Spanish, Mandarin, Modern Standard Arabic. It also might be the result of conquest and suppression, as with Turkey’s outlawing of not just the Kurdish language but also letters q, w, and x were forbidden “because they appeared in the Kurdish and not the Turkish alphabet.” Some languages (notably Hebrew and Welsh) have returned from near-death. But many, many more are going or gone; in the case of Italy, the author notes, there are a dozen legally acknowledged “minority languages,” but this leaves out a great many more. Smith Galer closes her discussion on a strongly political note: Language rights, she asserts, “are inseparable from a community’s other rights,” and linguistic autonomy presupposes political autonomy, with minority-language speakers gaining influence in the dominant community, “taking up space and making meaning of the world.” One good start, she counsels, is for us all to learn a second language, ideally before the grandfolks are gone.
A sobering, urgent call for action to save a thousand tongues while we can.Pub Date: July 7, 2026
ISBN: 9798217086979
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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