A language enthusiast offers a compilation of amusing and singular columns.
A collection of newspaper columns muses on the eccentricities of English and other languages.
In this second edition of her volume of Bill Bryson–esque columns, Janssen draws on decades of teaching and learning languages to engage in a lighthearted exploration of grammar, etymology, family history, cultural exchange, and anything else that interests her. The columns, arranged thematically, deal primarily with the author’s lifelong fascination with languages—her native English, the Spanish she studied and taught, her parents’ Dutch and Italian—and her enthusiasm for sharing them with others. Many address the benefits, both financial and personal, of studying multiple languages, and the columns on grammar are refreshingly un-crotchety (enthusiastically endorsing, for instance, the singular they). Janssen is a knowledgeable teacher and enthusiastic student, but she is also charmingly self-deprecatory: “Keyboarding is not the only type of boarding at which I have failed. I’ve also flopped (literally, onto concrete and into ice banks) at skateboarding and snowboarding.” Although the book does not rely heavily on research citations, the information presented is solid and avoids the unsubstantiated folk etymologies that too often attract amateur linguists. Janssen’s insights into the nature of language are strengthened by her familiarity with several beyond her native tongue, allowing her to explore the cultural implications of hygge and schadenfreude as well as the value of the Spanish word “estadounidenses,” a concise way to describe U.S. citizens while allowing “American” to apply to the rest of the hemisphere. Columns celebrating the tradition/marketing ploy of naming a “word of the year” are particularly delightful (“There is no need to suffer the lengthy awkwardness of writing on your Christmas wish list, ‘I want one of those collapsible monopods to attach to my camera or cell phone for better selfies,’ when you can just say, ‘Dear Santa, please bring me a selfie stick!’ ”). Readers in search of engaging, entertaining, and occasionally thought-provoking essays should enjoy the pieces that make up this collection.
A language enthusiast offers a compilation of amusing and singular columns.Pub Date: June 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9983048-2-3
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Lexicon Alley Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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
