Most useful to readers familiar with Spanish and looking to expand their vocabularies, but it’s not suitable as a primary...
An idiosyncratic approach to teaching Spanish vocabulary.
With a heavy emphasis on English-Spanish cognates, Nus’ (Italian Fluency, 2012) guide presents useful vocabulary for Anglophones learning to speak Spanish. After an overview of complementary methods of language learning (apps, videos, etc.), Nus dives into lists of words that are similar in English and Spanish. The cognates are first organized by common lexigraphic elements (i.e., words ending in -mento/-miento) and presented in list form. Subsequent word lists are organized by theme, from food and the arts through business and technology. After presenting a list of verbs Nus considers essential to comprehension, the book then uses quotations, rendered in both English and Spanish, to demonstrate the use of approximately 1,000 commonly used words. The translations provided are generally correct, and Nus incorporates a wide range of basic vocabulary. However, in several cases, only one definition is provided for a word with multiple distinct meanings. For example, tarde is translated as an adjective, but its meaning as a noun is omitted; planta is translated as “plant,” with no mention of its other meanings of “sole,” “factory,” or “floor.” The words chosen for definition are arbitrary, and the omissions often seem likely to present difficulties in comprehension: la cura (“care, treatment, cure”) is defined but not el cura, which means “priest.” Minor spelling errors (“Ben Johnson,” “Frederick Douglas,” “Ralph Nadar”) do not detract from the book’s meaning, but combined with internal inconsistencies (desgracia is translated as “disgrace” just pages after readers are warned it is a false cognate), they are noticeable. The book is primarily focused on nouns and adjectives, and aside from conjugating the nine “essential” verbs, Nus does not address verb usage or Spanish grammar.
Most useful to readers familiar with Spanish and looking to expand their vocabularies, but it’s not suitable as a primary tool for learning the language.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4849-8791-9
Page Count: 356
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
