Spanish Peaks Library District

Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, of Protestant stock, in 1856, and died at Ayot St. Lawrence, Herts., in 1950. After a false start in XIX-century fashion as a novelist, he made a reputation as a journalist-critic of books, pictures, music and the drama. Meanwhile he had plunged into the Socialist revival of the eighteen-eighties and come out as one of the leaders who made the Fabian Society famouns, figuring prominently not only as a pamphleteer...

An intellectual detective story follows the quest to unlock one of the great secrets of human history--the decipherment of Linear B, an unknown script from the Aegean Bronze Age.

"We all had teachers who scolded us over the use of um, uh-huh, oh, like, and mm-hmm. But as linguist N. J. Enfield reveals in How We Talk, these "bad words" are fundamental to language. Whether we are speaking with the clerk at the store, our boss, or our spouse, language is dependent on things as commonplace as a rising tone of voice, an apparently meaningless word, or a glance-signals so small that we hardly pay them any conscious attention. Nevertheless,...

The maestro storyteller and reporter provocatively argues that what we think we know about speech and human evolution is wrong. Tom Wolfe, whose legend began in journalism, takes us on an eye-opening journey that is sure to arouse widespread debate. THE KINGDOM OF SPEECH is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech--not evolution--is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements. From Alfred Russel Wallace, the Englishman...

"One of the World's most prominent public intellectuals, Noam Chomsky has, in more than fifty years of writing on politics, philosophy, and language, revolutionized modern linguistics and established himself as one of the most original and wide-ranging political and social critics of our time. The Essential Chomsky brings together selections from his most important writings since 1959 - from his groundbreaking critique of B.F. Skinner to his bestselling,...

Great writing begins--and ends--with the sentence. Whether two words ("Jesus wept.") or 1,287 words (a sentence in William Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!), sentences have the power to captivate, entertain, motivate, educate, and, most importantly, delight. Understanding the variety of ways to construct sentences, from the smallest clause to the longest sentence, is important to enhancing your appreciation of great writing and potentially improving your...

This book is a history of human speech from prehistory to the present. It charts the rise of some languages and the fall of others, explaining why some survive and others die. It shows how languages change their sounds and meanings, and how the history of languages is closely linked to the history of peoples.Writing in a lively, readable style, distinguished Swedish scholar Tore Janson makes no assumptions about previous knowledge. He takes the reader...

"Describes how linguistic evidence is used to solve crimes"--Provided by publisher.