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Double Negative (Felony & Mayhem Mysteries)
Dedicated to the study of toddlers and their development of verbal skills, the Wabash Institute should be staffed by kinder, gentler scholars, but instead is home to a nest of sublimely cranky academics. When one of them is bludgeoned to death, Jeremy Cook – the Institute’s premier scholar and the book’s socially clueless hero – becomes the prime suspect. To clear his name, Cook resolves to solve the case, even if it means taking time off from his hobby of teaching imaginary words to the Institute’s tiny “subjects.” While gleefully skewering academia, Carkeet – himself a professor of linguistics – also provides a spectacularly ingenious puzzle. “Mystery stories that have a really original solution to the crime are very rare,” said the New York Times Book Review, “but Dr. Carkeet has found one.”.
Price: $6.38
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Crasswords: Dirty Crosswords for Cunning Linguists (Crossword)
You won’t find any of these crosswords in your local paper. This compendium of puzzles filled with x-rated innuendo and unadulterated wordplay effectively demonstrates that not all brain bafflers have to be filled with boring facts and figures to be thoroughly diverting. Adults with a racy sense of humor will love its irreverent, off-the-wall themes and entries. Try this clue: They solicit from door to door. Answer: Avon. In addition to the crass words, the book contains three cryptic crosswords full of devious wordplay and gratuitous filth. These top-notch creations with below-the-belt sensibilities will make a great novelty or gag gift, too. .
Price: $2.56
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Bastard Tongues: A Trail-Blazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages
Why Do Isolated Creole Languages Tend to Have Similar Grammatical Structures? Bastard Tongues is an exciting, firsthand story of scientific discovery in an area of research close to the heart of what it means to be human—what language is, how it works, and how it passes from generation to generation, even where historical accidents have made normal transmission almost impossible. The story focuses on languages so low in the pecking order that many people don’t regard them as languages at all—Creole languages spoken by descendants of slaves and indentured laborers in plantation colonies all over the world. The story is told by Derek Bickerton, who has spent more than thirty years researching these languages on four continents and developing a controversial theory that explains why they are so similar to one another. A published novelist, Bickerton (once described as “part scholar, part swashbuckling man of action”) does not present his findings in the usual dry academic manner. Instead, you become a companion on his journey of discovery. You learn things as he learned them, share his disappointments and triumphs, explore the exotic locales where he worked, and meet the colorful characters he encountered along the way. The result is a unique blend of memoir, travelogue, history, and linguistics primer, appealing to anyone who has ever wondered how languages grow or what it’s like to search the world for new knowledge. .
Price: $13.95
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The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, the Anonymous Genius Who Proved Newton Wrong and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone, Among Other Surprising Feats
Physics textbooks identify Thomas Young (1773-1829) as the experimenter who first proved that light is a wave--not a stream of corpuscles as Newton proclaimed In any book on the eye and vision, Young is the London physician who showed how the eye focuses and proposed the three-color theory of vision confirmed only in 1959. In any book on ancient Egypt, Young is credited for his crucial detective work in deciphering the Rosetta Stone. It is hard to grasp how much he knew. Invited to contribute to a new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Young offered the following subjects: Alphabet, Annuities, Attraction, Capillary Action, Cohesion, Colour, Dew, Egypt, Eye, Focus, Friction, Halo, Hieroglyphic, Hydraulics, Motion, Resistance, Ship, Sound, Strength, Tides, Waves, and anything of a medical nature. He asked that all his contributions be kept anonymous. While not yet thirty he gave a course of lectures at the Royal Institution covering virtually all of known science. But polymathy made him unpopular in the academy. An early attack on his wave theory of light was so scathing that English physicists buried it for nearly two decades until it was rediscovered in France. But slowly, after his death, great scientists recognized his genius. Today, in an age of professional specialization unimaginable in 1800, polymathy still disturbs us. Is this kind of curiosity selfish, even irresponsible? Here is the story of a driven yet modest hero, the last man who knew everything..
Price: $4.99
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Babel-17/Empire Star
Author of the bestselling Dhalgren and winner of four Nebulas and one Hugo, Samuel R. Delany is one of the most acclaimed writers of speculative fiction. Babel-17, winner of the Nebula Award for best novel of the year, is a fascinating tale of a famous poet bent on deciphering a secret language that is the key to the enemy’s deadly force, a task that requires she travel with a splendidly improbable crew to the site of the next attack. For the first time, Babel-17 is published as the author intended with the short novel Empire Star, the tale of Comet Jo, a simple-minded teen thrust into a complex galaxy when he’s entrusted to carry a vital message to a distant world. Spellbinding and smart, both novels are testimony to Delany’s vast and singular talent..
Price: $7.97
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The Bitter Sea: Coming of Age in a China Before Mao
A haunting and illuminating true story of growing up in the turbulent early years of modern China
In this exceptional memoir, Charles N. Li brings into focus the growth pains of a nation undergoing torturous rebirth and offers an intimate understanding of the intricate, subtle, and yet all-powerful traditions that bind the Chinese family. Born near the beginning of World War II, Li Na was the youngest son of a wealthy Chinese government official. By the time he was twenty-one, he had witnessed enough hardship, hope, and tremendous change to last a lifetime. Li saw his family's fortunes dashed when Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists came to power in 1945, transforming his father from a powerful official to a prisoner jailed for treason. He survived a year in a dangerous Nanjing slum and watched from his aunt's Shanghai apartment as the Communist army marched in and seized the city in 1948. He experienced both the heady materialism of the decadent foreign "white ghosts" in British Hong Kong and the crippling starvation within the harsh confines of a Communist reform school. He went from being Li Na—the dutiful Chinese son yearning for a harsh, manipulative father's love—to Charles, an independent Chinese American seeking no one's approval but his own. Lyrical and luminous, intense and extraordinary, The Bitter Sea is an unforgettable tale of one young man and his country. .
Price: $6.35
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The Cunning Linguist: Ribald Riddles, Lascivious Limericks, Carnal Corn, and Other Good, Clean Dirty Fun
Have some fun with your native tongue! In The Cunning Linguist, renowned language expert Richard Lederer shows us the naughtier side of wordplay, revealing hundreds of hilarious, ingenious, unabashed, and adults-only puns, jokes, limericks, one-liners, and other adventures in sexual humor. This book of "good, clean dirty fun" will delight word hounds, punsters, bachelor-party goers, and anyone who likes a clever grown-up joke. Here's a taste of The Cunning Linguist: Q: What does a man have in his pants that you can also find on a pool table? A: Pockets. Have you heard about the incompatible couple? He had no income, and she wasn't pattable. The four stages of a couple's sex life: Under 35: Tri-weekly 35-45: Try weekly 45-55: Try weakly 55 and over: Try, try, try. For much more, sneak between the covers of this unique and laugh-out-loud book. .
Price: $4.78
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Barthes: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
Roland Barthes was the leading figure of French Structuralism, the theoretical movement of the 1960s which revolutionized the study of literature and culture, as well as history and psychoanalysis. But Barthes was a man who disliked orthodoxies. His shifting positions and theoretical interests make him hard to grasp and assess. This book surveys Barthes' work in clear, accessible prose, highlighting what is most interesting and important in his work today. In particular, the book describes the many projects, which Barthes explored and which helped to change the way we think about a range of cultural phenomena--from literature, fashion, wrestling, and advertising to notions of the self, of history, and of nature..
Price: $5.85
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