An informative and often pleasantly surprising cultural history.
The creation of an American dictionary incited fierce rivalries.
Martin (Samuel Johnson: A Biography, 2008, etc.) turns his attention to Americans who strived to compile a new dictionary to reflect the spirit of a new nation. In vivid detail, drawing on prodigious archival sources, the author follows the efforts of two strong-willed men who devoted their lives to the task: Noah Webster (1758-1843) and Joseph Emerson Worcester (1784-1865). Reviling Samuel Johnson for the “exclusive, pompous, artificial, and formal regularity of style” of his Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, many Americans called for “democratic expression more in keeping with the surging American romantic spirit of freedom, simplicity, and individuality.” Webster, a man of prickly nature and strong opinions, aimed to bring “linguistic unity and independence” to his dictionary. This meant that British words and definitions needed to be reassessed, as well as spelling: “k” dropped from words such as “musick” and “frolick”; “re” replaced by “er,” making the British “theatre” the American “theater.” Moreover, Webster believed that “grammar and lexicography should be moral agents, shielding the public by omitting language that was morally repugnant and offensive and providing definitions that were morally instructive.” Johnson had defined “whore,” but Webster would not. His American Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1828, with numerous editions and abridgments quickly following. Hoping to dominate the dictionary market, he had formidable competition from Worcester, shy, gentle, and more scholarly than Webster, who had already published several respected works of geography and history when he decided “that lexicography was his great calling.” Martin chronicles the many editions, revisions, and innovations as the competition intensified. The dictionary wars were hotly debated in newspapers and magazines, a drama that “captivated the American public.” After Webster died in 1843, family members vied for control of his copyright and profits, finally bringing an upstart publisher—the Merriam Brothers—into the project. Their new American Dictionary, published in 1847 and continuously revised, carried the Webster name into the future.
An informative and often pleasantly surprising cultural history.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-691-18891-1
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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