An engaging, informative overview of interesting linguistic matters.
An expansive look at how humans communicate.
Everett, a professor of anthropology and psychology and author of Numbers and the Making of Us, offers an enlightening examination of human communication based on the findings of linguist fieldworkers—himself included—as well as researchers in areas such as cognitive psychology, data science, and respiratory medicine. Whereas early theories about language commonalities and evolution were largely based on languages spoken in “Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies,” a wider range of inquiry into more than 7,000 languages has revealed “unexpected and profound” linguistic and cognitive diversity. The author discusses variations in words designating time and space, noting that “some aspects of time that seem so ‘natural’ to us English speakers may seem unnatural to speakers of many other languages.” Some languages have no tenses to indicate past, present, and future, while others have more than three tenses. Similarly, even within similar environments, “people talk about space in sometimes unpredictable ways”—e.g., using egocentric or geocentric ways of referring to spatial orientation. In denoting kinship, too, languages may vary according to the speaker’s relationship to another individual. In languages that have gendered nouns (Spanish, French, German), categorization of people and objects is motivated, “in some cases but not in others, by associations with biological sex.” Everett draws on abundant research investigating sensory words, such as those referring to color, taste, and smell, to reveal great variety “across the world’s languages. He identifies WEIRD languages as having a particularly “impoverished language of smells.” Physiognomy and environment contribute to linguistic diversity, as well. “The relationship between bite type and labiodental consonants,” writes the author, “ultimately hints at a relationship between the environments in which people live and some of the sounds they use to distinguish their thoughts when communicating.” Surprisingly, though, one word seems universal, “conveying a common thought in a predictable phonetic package”—the monosyllabic “huh.”
An engaging, informative overview of interesting linguistic matters.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780674976580
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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