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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 Institutes premier scholar and the books 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 Institutes 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: $5.86
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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
Born in 1773, Thomas Young lived in a pivotal time. The explosion of knowledge that was soon to come made it impossible to be a true polymatha master of multiple disciplines. Young was the last of the polymaths, and his contributions to science are truly staggering. Challenging the theories of Isaac Newton, he was the first to prove that light is a wave; his work on the Rosetta Stone was instrumental in deciphering the language of the ancient Egyptians; and his study of the human eye led him to formulate the three-color theory of vision, more than a century before it could be proved. And yet, Young was ridiculed and rejected by the scientific establishment throughout his lifetime. In The Last Man Who Knew Everything, Andrew Robinson returns this forgotten genius to his proper position in the pantheon of great scientific thinkers. Thoroughly researched and elegantly executed, Robinson reveals the humble brilliance of a man whose eclectic genius ostracized him from his peersbut whose extraordinary breakthroughs were indispensable in forming the foundation of modern knowledge..
Price: $0.39
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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: $13.44
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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: $7.40
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The Five-Minute Linguist
The Five-Minute Linguist: Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages takes a new approach to making accurate and up-to-date knowledge about language accessible in a non-academic way. It consists of some 55-60 chapters, each about 700 words long, adapted from the weekly scripts of a popular U.S. public radio series on language. The scripts, contributed by a cross-section of leading professional linguists in America and abroad, address questions like "How many languages are there in the world?" "Should we teach languages in elementary school?" and "How good is machine translation?" They are written with a light touch that has been highly successful in reaching an audience of intelligent non-specialists. The book will preserve that light touch while adding such features as an index (to help readers connect topics touched on in more than one chapter) and suggestions for follow-up reading..
Price: $15.95
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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: $12.97
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