The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson—the acclaimed author of The Lost Continent—brilliantly explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language. From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can't), to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed into one of the world's largest growth industries.

ISBN: 0380715430

Author: Bill Bryson

Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks

Rating: 3.97

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The Heidi Chronicles: Uncommon Women and Others Isn t It Romantic

The Heidi Chronicles: Uncommon Women and Others Isn t It Romantic

The graduating seniors of a Seven Sisters college, trying to decide whether to pattern themselves after Katharine Hepburn or Emily Dickinson. Two young women besieged by the demands of mothers, lovers, and careers—not to mention a highly persistent telephone answering machine—as they struggle to have it all. A brilliant feminist art historian trying to keep her bearings and her sense of humor on the elevator ride from the radical sixties to the heartless eighties.

Wendy Wasserstein's characters are so funny, so many-sided, and so real that we seem to know them from their Scene One entrances, though the places they go are invariably surprising. And these three plays—Uncommon Women and Others, Isn't It Romantic, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heidi Chronicles—manage to engage us heart, mind, and soul on such a deep and lasting level that they are already recognized as classics of the modern theater.

ISBN: 0679734996

Author: Wendy Wasserstein

Publisher: Vintage

Rating: 3.82

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Coming into the Country

Coming into the Country

This is the story of Alaska and the Alaskans. Written with a vividness and clarity which shifts scenes frequently, and yet manages to tie the work into a rewarding whole, McPhee segues from the wilderness to life in urban Alaska to the remote bush country.

ISBN: 0374522871

Author: John McPhee

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Rating: 4.21

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