Catalog Search Results
Author
Description
With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson—the acclaimed author of The Lost Continent—brilliantly explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language. From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can't), to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed...
Author
Pub. Date
[2018]
Description
Is vocabulary destiny? Why do clocks 'talk' to the Nahua
people of Mexico? Will A.I. researchers ever produce true
human-machine dialogue? In this mesmerizing collection of
essays, Daniel Tammet answers these and many other
questions about the intricacy and profound power of
language. Tammet goes back in time to explore the numeric
language of his autistic childhood; he looks at the music
and...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Description
Malcolm Gladwell offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers - and why they often go wrong. How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to each other that isn't true? A challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals...
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Description
Writers talk about their work in many ways: as an art, as a calling, as a lifestyle. Too often missing from these conversations is the fact that writing is also a business. The reality is, those who want to make a full- or part-time job out of writing are going to have a more positive and productive career if they understand the basic business principles underlying the industry. The Business of Being a Writer Jane Friedman has more than twenty years...
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Description
A tour of the world's twenty most-spoken languages explores the history, geography, linguistics, and cultures that have been shaped by languages and their customs.
"English is the world language, except that most of the world doesn't speak it--only one in five people does. Gaston Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world's 7.4 or so billion people in their mother tongues, you would need to know no fewer than twenty languages....
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Formats
Description
"Silvia Ferrara leads a code cracking mission to decipher the hidden truths and histories of our greatest invention-the art of writing"--
Ferrara takes a profound look at how-- and how many times-- human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language around the world. Readers will examine the enigmas of undeciphered scripts; study the turtle shells and ox scapulae that bear the earliest Chinese inscriptions, and venture to the cutting...
12) A Shropshire lad
Author
Description
The charms of the poems in A Shropshire Lad, published in 1896, continue to resonate today. Housman's first collection and his signature work, the poems here mix the styles of traditional English ballads and classical verse, and evoke the idyllic English countryside, explore the nature of friendship, bravery, and the passing of youth, among other themes.
16) Essays one
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Description
"A selection of essays on writing and reading by the master short-fiction writer Lydia Davis"--
20) McTeague
Author
Description
First published in 1899, this graphic depiction of urban American life centers around its title character, McTeague, a dentist practicing in San Francisco at the turn of the century. While at first content with his life and friendship with an ambitious man named Marcus, McTeague eventually courts and marries Trina, a frugal young woman who wins a large sum of money in a lottery. The greed of the majority of the characters in the novel creates a chain...