15
Apr
2009
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
It’s hard enough to condense 30,000 years of human culture, movement, and industry into one book, let alone one review of said book, but I’ll give it my best shot.
13
Apr
2009
The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher
O.K., I’m a big nerd. One of the things I’m really into is linguistics. I love grammar and root words and trying to figure out just what words came first and how and why. But not all of the books I read on the subject(s) are that good. Sometimes they veer off the path and start talking about the evolution of the theory of linguistics, as does Christine Keneally’s The First Word. I blame Noam Chomsky for guiding the great vessel of linguistics along the coast, always keeping the shore in plain sight. What I mean by that metaphor is that Chomsky said why bother to search for the origins of language? It’s not gonna happen; let’s focus on what we can already test (like, uh, universal grammar, Noam?). Thus it was with great amounts of pleasure that I read Guy Deutscher’s book on, as the subtitle goes, the “evolutionary tour of mankind’s greatest invention.”
12
Apr
2009
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
There were a lot of classes I took in college, however, economics was not one of them. The reasons for this should be fairly obvious. When this book came out, I didn’t intend to read it, but someone lent it to me and I never gave it back (it’s O.K., it was just my in-laws and they should know by now what a book thief I am). 
