Grandin, Temple. Thinking in Pictures and other reports from my life with autism. Vintage, 1996.

I'm not sure that this should be the first work one should read about autism, but it provides both a wealth of information and a perspective which I am not certain one could find anywhere else.
Temple Grandin is one of the very few autistic people who have written books. Her book is a badly organized mixture of patches from an autobiography, a theoretical introduction to autism, a handbook for people who have to live with their own or others' autism, and I book about the care and processing of farm animals. (The lack of organization is not a pure fault; the aberrations of this book also teach an outsider much about autism). Dr. Grandin starts with her diagnosis of "mental defect" (more correct than most readers will understand, though she may) and goes on to discuss the problems caused by her lack of the normal ability to understand without conscious effort other people's motives and the rules of society. (One wishes that she had talked about her mother's divorce in more than one word). She also discusses the suffering caused by physical problems associated with her autism and by other people's reactions to her, sometimes understandable, sometimes malicious.
Grandin also discusses at length such practical questions as medical treatments for autism and relationships between autistic people and the opposite sex. She is more open-minded than most on most of the questions she discusses, both practical and theoretical, but she does have a certain tendency to follow the party line of the doctors.
People with practical problems will find the bibliography and "resource list" particularly useful.

Paperback

Haegeman, Liliane, ed. The New Comparative Syntax.

Maybe the problem is that I am not part of this book's intended audience, but it looks to me like neo-Chomskyism at its most pedantic, a book which could please only true believers. It is mostly diagrams and abbreviations, and manages to make an inherently exciting subject boring. The chapter on the construct state in Hebrew is particularly problematic. In accordance with a famous Chomskyite custom to which some object a priori, (I don't), much of the chapter is based on analysis of imaginary sentences. Unfortunately, one of the most frequent ones is also impossible. A doubtful demonstration on p. 171 suggests that the author has never read Gesenius. (In the interests of fairness: the author of that article still disagrees with every word I've said.)
Maybe it's not really all that bad. The introductory chapter is a good introduction to Chomskyan linguistics and its history, the chapter on pidgins and creoles asks a very interesting question, and often throughout the whole book the attractiveness of the subject manages to overcome the tedium of the treatment.

Paperback
Hardcover

Tuchman, Barbara W. The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914. Papermac, 1997.

Mrs. Tuchman's books are always perfectly researched, well thought out in content, and rich in understanding of human beings. This one includes insights into the thoughts of the confused Anarchist hitmen whose descendents are still throwing bombs in the names of other Movements, but for the same reasons, and into the historical destiny of Spain as "the desperado of countries".
The book is divided into sections on the mood of the British aristocracy at the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the mood of the Germans, the Hague disarmament conferences, the Dreyfus affair, the changes in the British constitution at the end of the nineteenth century, and the early history of socialism.
Both the language of the communiques and the political games played at the Hague conferences sound eerily like those of our day; the big difference is the number of sane and intelligent people then willing to argue that war is morally desirable. Mrs. Tuchman's remarks on the economic status of Belgium during the period under question were news to me.
Like a few other Tuchman books, this one seems to suffer both from the lack of a strong unifying theme and from the human interest which her usual device of using a single individual as a motif could have provided. The section on "Czar" Thomas Reed comes close, but isn't long enough to fit the bill.

Paperback

Kenyon, Kathleen M. Archaeology in the Holy Land.

Kenyon's book on The Archaeology of the Holy Land is much more traditional, wider, and deeper than Albright's book on the same subject. It covers the time from "The Beginnings of Settled Life" until the fall of the two Hebrew kingdoms. Kenyon goes into much more detail on stratigraphy, pottery typing, and the demographic conclusions to be drawn from the finds. She discusses several groups of Stone-Age inhabitants, but like most archaeologists, she tends to draw more conclusions about their religion than the evidence seems to warrant. When speaking of the Bronze Age, she integrates the archaeological, the Biblical, and the other literary evidence well. Her analysis of the physical evidence for the history of the ends of the two Hebrew kingdoms is especially detailed. A warning to the overconfident youngsters, especially among the Bible-Studies people:

It is generally accepted that Palestinian Early Bronze Age II is contemporary with the First Dynasty of Egypt, of which the date accepted in the revised edition of the Cambridge Ancient History is 3100 to 2900 B.C. This would place the Proto-Urban Period in the second half of the fourth millennium B.C. This would fit the discovery at Megiddo of a number of sealings impressed on jars which are usually considered to be of the Jemdet Nasr period in Mesopotamia, which again belongs to the second half of the fourth millennium. Jericho Tomb A 94 has produced a Carbon-14 date. The original result gave 3260 B.C. +- 110. But further research in recent years has shown, as has been explained on p. 64, that dates have to be adjusted to take into account variations in the sun's radiation, and samples giving dates of the late fourth millennium have to be read as being some seven hundred years earlier. On Palestinian evidence, this made nonsense. However, further material from the same sample has been tested, and the date when adjusted gets us back again to 3200 B.C. This all seems very odd and shakes one's faith.

The discussions of the cultural differences between the Two Kingdoms and their causes are particularly interesting. Kenyon gives the impression, from physical evidence, that the southern kingdom was more given to what she politely calls "unorthodox cults". My eleven-year old and I both had the opposite impression, based on the Biblical texts. There are, of course, some obvious explanations.

Solomon, R. C. and Higgins, K. M. A Short History of Philosophy.

Although this book is organized like the standard academic history of philosophy, the authors have dispensed with the intentionally obscure language which professors of philosophy were using for a while to prove that they were serious. They have also added a lot of material on such subjects as the philosophy of the Bible and the Talmud and the philosophy of pre-literate African cultures. Although they probably did so because of their own personal prejudices, this introduces a consistency to their approach which is lacking in many similar works. Nietzsche also declaims without attempting to prove, so in what way is he more of a philosopher than the prophets?
Similarly, they deal seriously with Pascal and Montaigne, also suspected by most professors of philosophy of being insufficiently 'analytic'. Take a look at what they have to say about Spinoza's Ethics.

Paperback
Hardcover

Weir, Alison. The Wars of the Roses. Ballantine, 1996.

This book is well researched and excellently written, but it may be more important as a primary source in historiography than as a secondary source in history. Thinking about the Wars of the Roses reminds us that there are some good sides even to post-modernist history: Our earlier fascination with aristocratic wars which "had very little effect on the population at large" seems to be a relic of the time when only aristocrats could write. The popularity of this subject also underlines yet again the overwhelming influence of Shakespeare on our entire culture, which I've never seen adequately explained.
If she once more says "prevaricate" when she seems to mean "procrastinate", I'm going to scream, but the book's still a pleasure.

Paperback

Chute, Marchette. Shakespeare of London. Souvenir Press, 1977.

"The book is not a literary biography. It does not concern the part of Shakespeare that was immortal and for all time. It concerns only the part of him that was mortal and belonged to the Elizabethan age. His plays are not discussed as literature, but only as they relate to the working problems of the London stage."
Miss Chute needn't have been so modest. There is much in her book which can increase one's appreciation of the plays. Her discussions of Shakespeare's contemporaries and their different audiences helps one to understand Shakespeare's view of the different social levels of his audience as it affected the structure of the plays. Her discussions of the Elizabethan stage in general help one to understand what Shakespeare put in his plays because is was a commercial necessity, what he put in his plays because it would not have occurred to him that one could write a play without them, and what he did which was new, and which makes Shakespeare Shakespeare. She also discusses his literary development in terms of his personal growth and the influence of historical events.
Some of Miss Chute's critical remarks on the plays, like her position that Hamlet's remarks to the players are almost the opposite of Shakespeare's own opinions, are unusual. Others, like depth of character as Shakespeare's contribution, were probably conventional in 1949, but need to be reread now that it is more important for critics to be original than to tell the truth.
Shakespeare of London also contains the details of Shakespeare's life, though in a rather dry style.

Hardcover

Bryant, Margaret M. Modern English and Its Heritage.

There are few people who know how to write an entertaining textbook. Apparently the need for clear organization and for at least mentioning several views of moot questions stifles the creative urge. In addition, the authors of textbooks often treat their readers with contempt: If you really had a brain, you would be studying something closer to the source than my textbook.
Bryant's book suffers from textbook disease, but once again the subject, and even some aspects of the presentation, keep the book from being a total bore. She supports her claims by many examples, often from Old English, and often long enough to engage our interest. She also does a good job of surveying the work of her colleagues, especially on usage. People living in the United States may also not realize that the battle against those she calls "the authoritarians" is not yet over.
Like most authors of textbooks, she knows everything. There was a single language which we now call Indo-European. Fact. "There is no such thing as a universal grammar." No other opinions exist.
I guess the tenure committee doesn't much care whether they enjoy their reading or not. Or maybe they just don't bother reading these things.

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