Book Recommendations

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Earlier in the show, I recommended the book Watch Your Tongue by Mark Abley, which is light and fun and an easy read. And for something more chewy, I’d like to recommend Lane Green’s new book. It’s called Talk on the Wild Side, Why Language Can’t Be Tamed.

Lane Green writes about language for The Economist magazine, and he speaks nine languages himself. And his book is a really smart, thoughtful way of writing about a lot of the themes that we discuss here on the show, about why you shouldn’t worry about language changing and about non-gendered pronouns and split infinitives and why they’re just great. And he even talks about the decline of the word whom, which I’m slowly letting go of, but not completely.

But one of the things I really love about his book is that he’s got a knack for really memorable lines. You know, you and I talk about language all the time, but he has a way of phrasing things that’s really arresting. For example, he says that language is a wild animal like a wolf, well adapted for its conditions and needs. I love that.

Yeah, isn’t that great? And he also says scientists have never found a language that has fallen to pieces. It’s not in language’s nature. Humans need it to do too many important things. And he just goes on and on like that. It’s just a really great way of phrasing the kinds of things that our listeners are going to be familiar with. It’s a new way of looking at it.

You know, it’s interesting that you said you had one book that was light and another one that was chewy, because I have the same kinds of recommendations. So my son started asking my wife and me about trench warfare. And I’m like, what? Would you know enough about anything to be able to ask me at all about trench warfare? And it turns out that he was reading a series of books called Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales.

The series of books is written and illustrated by a man named Nathan Hale. And just asterisk that for a second. And they touch on significant events in American history, like Lafayette and the Revolutionary War, World War I, World War II, and a bunch of other things. And he includes the story of the American spy, Nathan Hale. And so just to clarify, the author has exactly the same name as the American spy who was executed by the British, Nathan Hale. They’re not related, although apparently the author is related to the man who hired the spy back in the day.

Oh, my goodness.

So it was really interesting stuff.

In any case, I read the World War I book that Nathan Hale wrote and illustrated.

It’s called Treaties, Trenches, Mud, and Blood.

And I enjoyed it.

It’s a graphic novel.

It’s got a little bit of humor.

It doesn’t shy too much away from the dark stuff.

But it balances out the truth of the horrible things that humans do to each other with some levity and comedy.

And the big perspective, the bird’s eye perspective that you need to really, 100 years later, kind of grasp what was happening.

And certainly for my son, who was 11, it was exactly what he needed.

Not too much, not too little, didn’t treat him like a child.

And he loves all of these books, all of the Nathan Hales hazardous tale.

The other book, it just so happens that I was reading before this came along, was Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August.

She writes about the lead up to World War I.

She writes about what got us into this major conflict.

And it was funny, these two books complemented each other.

Hale’s book for kids, the graphic novel, was a nice summary.

But Tugmans gets into the details and the hard truths and the real difficult, strange things that had to happen in order to make the world go to war.

These one-off events that shouldn’t have taken place that turned into the reason that we all were firing guns at each other.

In any case, these two books, 100 years after the end of World War I, were both incredibly relevant this year.

And I thought worth recommending to anyone who hasn’t read them or encountered them before.

And that’s Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August.

And then the whole series, Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales, which is for kids.

Great.

We love your book recommendations.

When you tell us that you’re enjoying a book, a lot of times we add it to our library queue.

Or get it for ourselves or recommend it to our listeners.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Call us, 877-929-9673.

Or talk books like crazy on Twitter @wayword.