A fresh, vibrant, entertaining history.
The history of the creation of a dictionary built on a passion for words.
In her last days living in Oxford, before taking a teaching position at Stanford, linguist and lexicographer Ogilvie, who had worked as an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary, discovered six handwritten address books noting the names of more than 3,000 contributors to the project. Beginning in 1879, these men and women, from all over the world, had responded to a plea by the OED’s editor James Murray to submit words and their context for inclusion in the massive dictionary. Based on the information in the address books, which had been carried on by Murray’s successors, Ogilvie spent eight years researching the contributors’ identities, resulting in a fascinating history of a quirky population of individuals, some university educated, some autodidacts, who had in common a love of reading, a keen sensibility, and a desire to be part of a prestigious endeavor. Her lively compendium of dictionary people includes an archaeologist living in Calcutta who submitted 5,000 words that she discovered in religious books and travelers’ tales; the inventors of the electric tricycle, the sewage pipe, and indelible green ink for printing money; several men incarcerated in mental institutions, one of whom was a murderer; a pair of lesbian lovers; and suffragists, such as the secretary of the Birmingham Women’s Suffrage Society, whose submissions were drawn not from her political involvement but from her reading in philosophy and religion. Ogilvie’s archival sleuthing unearthed juicy scandals. For example, before becoming a contributor, groundbreaking photographer Eadweard Muybridge murdered his wife’s lover, for which he was acquitted by reason of insanity and justifiable homicide; and surgeon and Arctic explorer Sir John Richardson saw his reputation tarnished by accusations of murder and cannibalism during a failed expedition to find the Northwest Passage. While bringing to life a host of passionate volunteers, Ogilvie also charts decades of social, economic, and cultural change, mapped by words.
A fresh, vibrant, entertaining history.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780593536407
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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