Walker Percy, the novelist, has written a deadly serious work of theoretical linguistics. So serious is he that he suggests The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman and Love in the Ruins were written for comic relief to this twenty-years-in-progress inquiry into the relationship between human consciousness and the structure of language which eventually will end in dogged pursuit of the contents of Chomsky's "little black box"—the Language Acquisition Device (LAD). The box remains black, but Percy leaps over the heads of semanticists, syntacticians, transformational grammarians, psychologists, learning theorists, logicians, philosophers, semioticists and the rest of the empirically minded pack into a "radical" linguistic anthropology that purports to explain why 20th century man feels bad. The message in his bottle—the "news" for which the modern castaway desperately searches—seems for all the world to be the Christian gospel which he no longer has the "means" for understanding. Putting aside the religious argument, Percy tackles the failure of positivism and the need for "a metascientific, metacultural reality." His special perspective equates consciousness with symbolization and revives a theory of Charles Peirce (a predecessor of William James) for a tentative exploratory model of sentence formulation—making the connection between the object in the world and its verbal designation. Language and abstraction, as the characteristics that divide man from the rest of the animal kingdom, fascinate us too; but Percy promises a great deal at the outset and that final diagram of the triadic structure of the typical "semological-phonological" naming sentence seems most recondite. It may be accessible to specialists.
Pub Date: June 16, 1975
ISBN: 0312254016
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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