A well-written, attention-grabbing journey into polyglot life.
An advocate for bilingualism notes the many advantages of learning other languages.
In this nonfiction book, Leveen, the author of Holding Dear (2013), uses his own experience learning a second language in adulthood as a starting point for exploring the value of multilingual living. He also draws on dozens of interviews with linguistic experts and others—many of which were collected for his America the Bilingual podcast—to explore how and why people speak multiple languages and how it shapes their everyday lives. Some interviewees learned a second language for professional advancement; others did so as children to engage with their immigrant parents; and still others are expatriates who’ve picked up enough words and phrases to get by. One of the book’s main objectives is encouraging English-speaking American readers to expand their horizons. It also gets into the history of linguistic trends in the United States, including the phenomenon of English-only advocacy. Leveen’s writing is solid, and he does an excellent job of weaving his many discussions into an overarching narrative; the compelling stories keep the pages turning despite the book’s considerable length. He’s realistic about the challenges of learning a new language but still encouraging (“I’ve never heard anyone say to me, ‘I took four years of high school band’ and then complain that they can’t sit in with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra”), and he urges readers to understand bilingualism as a continuum, not a binary status. Appendices provide additional references for those interested in bilingualism advocacy, and a substantial collection of endnotes provides additional discussion.
A well-written, attention-grabbing journey into polyglot life.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7339375-2-8
Page Count: 572
Publisher: America the Bilingual Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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