Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2018 -

Making Sense complements Crystal's recent books on spelling and punctuation--Spell It Out: The Curious, Enthralling, and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling (CH, May'14, 51-4856) and Making a Point: The Persnickity Story of English Punctuation (2015)--offering an equally well-informed and sensible perspective on grammar. Comprising 29 brief chapters, Making Sense speaks both to those new to grammar and to those with some expertise. For those new to grammar, Crystal's systematic, avuncular exposition painlessly introduces concepts, keywords, and grammatical reasoning. For aficionados, Crystal provides depth and perspective--and for teachers new ideas. The book first introduces parts of speech, clauses, and grammatical functions by tracing the language development of Crystal's daughter. Next comes a set of chapters on the role of grammar in communication and the importance of semantics and context. Crystal rounds out the book by discussing grammar change (and resistance to change) and the educational consequences of do-as-I-say-ism. Many chapters offers interludes, as the author calls them, in which the history of grammar and grammar teaching are brought to life. Making Sense ends with a summary of ten principles about grammar--not grammar rules but rather key ideas that encapsulate Crystal's view of grammar as an intellectual enterprise--along with an appendix on grammar teaching and testing.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

This brilliant volume is sure to earn high praise from literature specialists, and the breadth of Oerlemans's focus and his willingness to draw from a diverse range of theoretical positions guarantee that the book will be widely read by those outside literature. The only other book focused exclusively on animals and poetry is Randy Malamud's fine Poetic Animals and Animal Souls (CH, Oct'03, 41-0793). But whereas Malamud's book is most valuable for its theoretical speculation, the strength of Oerlemans's book lies in its broad span. He draws on examples ranging from Chaucer to contemporary poets to support his basic thesis that poetry provides an essential means of problematizing the divide between humans and animals. Oerlemans (Hamilton College) organizes his book by categories of animal poems--animal allegories, poems devoted to species, poems focused on individual animals, and, most intriguingly, poems that discuss hybridity. Also author of Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (CH, Dec'02, 40-2039), Oerlemans provides a thorough scholarly apparatus, including the requisite theoretical contextualization, but the book remains accessible to undergraduates and nonspecialists because of Oerlemans's clear and vigorous prose and the inclusion of generous quotations from the poetry under discussion.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers.

Electronic literature is a literary art that has bloomed across computer screens and mainframes for decades and has become a vital component of global literary culture. It has also questioned the very tenets of literary theory and pushed toward not just postmodern but also posthuman ideas. The work done by the artists and scholars in this arena continues to gain importance, given the ubiquity of the computing culture, but until now there has been no major reference handbook for the field. (The closest to date has been N. Katherine Hayles's Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, CH, Sep'08, 46-0110.) Tabbi (English, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago) has organized his foundational handbook in four parts that provide a needed framework for the work in this field. The first two sections--"Ends, Beginnings," "Poetics, Polemics"--work their way through the key insights and concepts developed since the inception of the field. The other two sections--"Materialities, Ontologies," "Economies, Precarities"--provide key essays on how electronic literature's formats have helped to define contemporary digital life. Including an annotated bibliography of major texts in this field, this is an invaluable resource for those interested in where literature is going.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

Tougaw (Queens College) ably surveys an array of contemporary literary forms that in one way or another emphasize the brain, among them "brain memoirs," "neuronovels," and "neurocomics." In each chapter, he focuses closely on key passages from a small number of representative works in each form: e.g., Temple Grandin's memoir of autism; Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, a first-person novel narrated by Lionel Essrog, who suffers verbal outbursts and bodily tics brought on by Tourette's; and Ellen Forney's graphic memoir Marbles, which illustrates her attempts to cope with her diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Collectively, such works--and Tougaw, for that matter--make a case for "neurodiversity": i.e., what some consider a crippling condition can at times be used to great advantage (e.g., Essrog, a detective, is able to glean clues and interview more capably because of his condition). Fundamental antecedents discussed in Tougaw's volume include the works of Oliver Sacks, whose psychiatric profiles provided starting points for efforts by Lethem and others. Tougaw knows his literary history, and he is expert at citing lineage (e.g., Cervantes, Sterne, Poe, and James for the neuronovel). This is a brilliant, readable work of scholarship.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.