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
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
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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