Fatter and more complex than Strunk and White, and some of the more technical arguments may make this a tough sell on the...
Yet another how-to book on writing? Indeed, but this is one of the best to come along in many years, a model of intelligent signposting and syntactical comportment.
It’s a strange thing, but many guidebooks on writing are written by people who’ve written only books on how to write. Not so Pinker’s. Though being a linguist, as he is, doesn’t make a writer any more than putting air in an airplane wheel makes a pilot, he’s also got numerous best-selling books (e.g., The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, 2011, etc.) behind him—and even that doesn’t make him an expert, so we’re lucky that, like fellow manual writer Stephen King, he’s blessed with common sense. As a linguist, Pinker inclines to descriptivism but doesn’t rule out prescriptivism entirely. “The primary lifeline between an incoming sentence and a reader’s web of knowledge is the topic,” he writes, carefully separating the different senses of the term “topic” in the realms of linguistics and grammar before discussing such common-sensical things as orderly transitions, logical coordination and pronoun/antecedent agreement. The author insists that any writer must be an “avid” reader, and he takes many of his examples from current literature to support pronouncements such as, “But if the subject matter is unfamiliar and has many parts, and if the writer doesn’t set the reader up by focusing on one of those parts as a fact worth taking seriously, the reader may not know what he should no longer be thinking.” Allowing for the “the reader/he” convention, there’s nothing objectionable to that observation or, indeed, to most of the book, even if Pinker courts anarchy by allowing the distinction between “less” and “fewer” to collapse.
Fatter and more complex than Strunk and White, and some of the more technical arguments may make this a tough sell on the first-year comp front. Still, Pinker’s vade mecum is a worthy addition to any writer’s library.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-02585-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Naughty good fun from an impossibly sardonic rogue, quickly rising to Twainian stature.
The undisputed champion of the self-conscious and the self-deprecating returns with yet more autobiographical gems from his apparently inexhaustible cache (Naked, 1997, etc.).
Sedaris at first mines what may be the most idiosyncratic, if innocuous, childhood since the McCourt clan. Here is father Lou, who’s propositioned, via phone, by married family friend Mrs. Midland (“Oh, Lou. It just feels so good to . . . talk to someone who really . . . understands”). Only years later is it divulged that “Mrs. Midland” was impersonated by Lou’s 12-year-old daughter Amy. (Lou, to the prankster’s relief, always politely declined Mrs. Midland’s overtures.) Meanwhile, Mrs. Sedaris—soon after she’s put a beloved sick cat to sleep—is terrorized by bogus reports of a “miraculous new cure for feline leukemia,” all orchestrated by her bitter children. Brilliant evildoing in this family is not unique to the author. Sedaris (also an essayist on National Public Radio) approaches comic preeminence as he details his futile attempts, as an adult, to learn the French language. Having moved to Paris, he enrolls in French class and struggles endlessly with the logic in assigning inanimate objects a gender (“Why refer to Lady Flesh Wound or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?”). After months of this, Sedaris finds that the first French-spoken sentiment he’s fully understood has been directed to him by his sadistic teacher: “Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.” Among these misadventures, Sedaris catalogs his many bugaboos: the cigarette ban in New York restaurants (“I’m always searching the menu in hope that some courageous young chef has finally recognized tobacco as a vegetable”); the appending of company Web addresses to television commercials (“Who really wants to know more about Procter & Gamble?”); and a scatological dilemma that would likely remain taboo in most households.
Naughty good fun from an impossibly sardonic rogue, quickly rising to Twainian stature.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-316-77772-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
PERSPECTIVES
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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