Books - Other Nonfiction

The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language. Bragg, Melvin. New York: Arcade, 2003. Bragg reveals the history of the English language from its beginnings as a Germanic dialect through the events that molded it, such as the three hundred years after the invasion of the Normans that saw French as the official (i.e., governmental) language of England. Also discussed are the Church's attempts at discrediting the language, to the extent of influencing the government to make possession of a bible printed in English illegal, once the invention of the printing press made production and distribution feasable on an unprecedented scale. He shows how its heavy borrowing from many languages of Europe has, despite its Germanic origins, caused it to share much with the Romance languages; and and how the currents of history have also enabled it to pull in bits and pieces of other languages from around the world.
Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-Ray. Simon, Linda. New York: Harcourt, 2004. "A revelatory cultural history of electricity's introduction in the last half of the nineteenth century - and our surprisingly strong resistance to it." Resistance......hey, I get it!
Inventing Modern. Lienhard, John H. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. "The way to understanding any epoch is by reclaiming its peculiar texture. ... It was a world dancing with new X-rays, radium, and radio waves – Art Deco and Bauhaus, skyscrapers and Burma-Shave signs. Modern was the now-abandoned Teepee Model down in Wharton County, Texas, and Grauman's Chinese Theatre. It was Fritz Lang's Movie Metropolis and Buck Rogers. We last saw Modern speeding off into the mists of the fifties on great automobile talifins. ... Intstead of explaining how Modern came into being and then vanished, we relive it. We watch its birth a century ago, we join in the frenetic intensity of its middle years, and at last we attend its passing in the late fifties."

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