Walker Percy, the novelist, has written a deadly serious work of theoretical linguistics. So serious is he that he suggests The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman and Love in the Ruins were written for comic relief to this twenty-years-in-progress inquiry into the relationship between human consciousness and the structure of language which eventually will end in dogged pursuit of the contents of Chomsky's "little black box"—the Language Acquisition Device (LAD). The box remains black, but Percy leaps over the heads of semanticists, syntacticians, transformational grammarians, psychologists, learning theorists, logicians, philosophers, semioticists and the rest of the empirically minded pack into a "radical" linguistic anthropology that purports to explain why 20th century man feels bad. The message in his bottle—the "news" for which the modern castaway desperately searches—seems for all the world to be the Christian gospel which he no longer has the "means" for understanding. Putting aside the religious argument, Percy tackles the failure of positivism and the need for "a metascientific, metacultural reality." His special perspective equates consciousness with symbolization and revives a theory of Charles Peirce (a predecessor of William James) for a tentative exploratory model of sentence formulation—making the connection between the object in the world and its verbal designation. Language and abstraction, as the characteristics that divide man from the rest of the animal kingdom, fascinate us too; but Percy promises a great deal at the outset and that final diagram of the triadic structure of the typical "semological-phonological" naming sentence seems most recondite. It may be accessible to specialists.
Pub Date: June 16, 1975
ISBN: 0312254016
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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