Great stuff for anyone who loves knowledge, deep or trivial. Some readers may even indulge in buying one of the more...
Lynch (English/Rutgers Univ.; The Lexicographer’s Dilemma: The Evolution of ‘Proper’ English, from Shakespeare to South Park, 2010) shares his love of reference books.
Reference books are made for looking up a particular point; they facilitate consultation rather than reading from cover to cover. However, as the author intriguingly demonstrates, it’s still fun to grab a volume of the encyclopedia and wander through it. In this entertaining “love letter to the great dictionaries, encyclopedias, and atlases,” Lynch traces the history of reference works from the ancients to Google and Wikipedia. One of the best chapters describes how he organizes his own collection, from those at the ready, like Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, to foreign language and slang dictionaries and the Concise Encyclopedia of Heraldry. As readers make their ways through this book, they are certain to discover a wide variety of must-haves—e.g., Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi’s Dictionary of Imaginary Places or Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable. The creators of reference books seek the orderly systematization of knowledge, and their creations bring respectability to everything they touch. Pliny’s Naturalis historia, Ptolemy’s Geography, William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, and even what may be a map of the stars in the caves of Lascaux were just a few of the first reference books. The Enlightenment saw the first vernacular dictionaries. The 17th-century Le Dictionnaire de l’Academie francois prescribed a word’s usage, while Samuel Johnson described the word itself. If a dictionary explains what something is, an encyclopedia explains how it works. Enter Denis Diderot, whose Encyclopédie used entries from the likes of Rousseau and Voltaire, setting the stage for the Encyclopaedia Britannica and eventually Wikipedia.
Great stuff for anyone who loves knowledge, deep or trivial. Some readers may even indulge in buying one of the more esoteric titles the author highlights—e.g., The Dictionary of Dainty Breakfasts or Collectible Spoons of the 3rd Reich.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8027-7752-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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