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BookNotes is your monthly guide to good, informative
reading. Each month BookNotes will feature the Editor's choice of titles.
This month our Editor has selected a range of books focusing on language,
literature and linguistics. As Don Watson, writer of Death Sentences,
quotes: "Language is always at risk and there have always
been people saying the sky is falling in on it, but I think this is
the first time the language has been co-opted to the service of a global
economy and its technology, forced into a customer-focused, market-driven,
spin-doctored shape."
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Death Sentences
Publisher:
Penguin
Author:
Don Watson
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Watson argues that the spread of
bullet points and buzzwords is not only a threat to proper
English, but to democracy itself. As schools take on mission
statements, hospitals refer to patients as customers, and
governments look to business paradigms to justify and explain
their policies, Watson suggests that real information, real
thought, and real feeling are being airbrushed from our lives.
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The War Against Clichés: Essays & Reviews
Publisher:
Random House
Author:
Martin Amis
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In Martin Amis's War Against
Cliché, a selection of critical essays and reviews
published between 1971 and 2000, he establishes himself
as one of the fiercest critics and commentators on the
literature and culture of the late 20th century. This war
leads to some wonderfully cutting and amusing responses
to whatever crosses his path, from books on chess and nuclear
proliferation to Cervantes' Don Quixote.
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A Collection Against Essays
Publisher:
Penguin
Author:
George Orwell
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The dozen other pieces collected here
prove that, given the right thinker/writer, today's journalism
actually can become tomorrow's literature. In particular, "Politics
and the English Language" is a prose working-out of Orwell's
perceptions about the slippery relationship of word and thought
that becomes a key premise of his novel 1984.
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The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
Publisher:
Harper Collins
Author:
Bill Bryson
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Who would have thought that a book
about English would be so entertaining? Bryson displays an encyclopedic
knowledge of his topic, and this inevitably encourages a light
tone; the more you know about a subject, the more absurd it becomes.
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