Delicious little essays of powerful intellectual curiosity.
Charming, loose-fitting essays about the sublime and silly pleasures of reading the dictionary.
Mexican-American Stavans (On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language, 2002, etc.) is an enormously personable writer, deeply read without letting on that he’s also an academic (Latino American and Latino Culture/Amherst). His essays probe with a light touch his quarry as a “dictionary hunter,” first prompted by his father’s gift of Appleton’s New English-Spanish and Spanish-English Dictionary when Stavans first moved to New York from Mexico in 1985. With it, he read Moby-Dick. He believes a dictionary’s function is to “build character,” and indeed his essay “Pride and Prejudice” mentions many of the lexicographers over the ages who have attempted to impart this very quality to their readers: Aristophanes of Byzantium and his first Lexeis; John Baret’s work of 1573; Samuel Johnson; the Encyclopeadists; Noah Webster; and the editors of the towering Oxford English Dictionary, just to name a few. Stavans includes some fine scholarship in Arabic and Hispanic dictionaries, as well. In “The Invention of Love,” he delineates how definitions of love (in different language dictionaries) help define a culture, while “The Zebra and the Swear Word” explores hilariously erroneous information given by dictionaries, such as the definition for day offered by the modern Real Academia Espanola as “the time the Sun takes to apparently circle the Earth.” And where, he wonders, are the swear words in the OED—words everybody uses but lexicographers are still embarrassed by? (There’s a nice catalogue of them.) “In the Land of Lost Words,” Stavans rues the rejection by dictionaries of such spectacular vernacular words as the Mexican street term for kitsch, rascuachismo, the remembrance of which affects Stavans with its elastic, ambivalent connotations. In “Dr. Johnson’s Visit,” he imagines receiving the great 18th-century lexicographer in his home and showing him his shelf of Cervantes translations—English, he notes proudly, was the first language the great author’s work was translated into.
Delicious little essays of powerful intellectual curiosity.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-55597-419-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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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