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"Taking readers on a rollicking ride through history, a master storyteller and reporter, whose legend began in journalism, presents a paradigm-shifting argument that speech, not evolution, is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements"--NoveList.
"Before Tom Wolfe was a bestselling novelist, he was a groundbreaking journalist. Now the maestro storyteller turns his attention to the mystery behind the creation of his own most important...
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"The Dictionary of Lost Words is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Before the lost word, there was another. It arrived at the Scriptorium in a second-hand envelope, the old address crossed out and Dr Murray, Sunnyside, Oxford, written in its place. It was Da's job to open the post and...
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English
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"Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow spent a decade traveling back and forth to Paris as well as living there. Yet one important lesson never seemed to sink in: how to communicate comfortably with the French, even when you speak their language. In The Bonjour Effect Jean-Benoit and Julie chronicle the lessons they learned after they returned to France to live, for a year, with their twin daughters. They offer up all the lessons they learned and explain,...
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English
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"Spins the reader on a whirlwind tour of sixty European languages and dialects, sharing quirky moments from their histories and exploring their commonalities and differences ... [and taking] us into today's remote mountain villages of Switzerland, where Romansh is still the lingua franca, to formerly Soviet Belarus, a country whose language was Russified by the Bolsheviks, to Sweden, where up until the 1960s polite speaking conventions required that...
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Tibetan
Description
In many Tibetan communities, the loss of Tibetan language has reached a crisis level. An elder generation is passing away, leaving behind fewer young Tibetans who can understand their own native language. The trend is most accelerated in villages at the outer edges of the Tibetan cultural sphere, where Chinese has become the dominant language of business and education. Hualong County, whose name translates to "Valley of the Heroes", is one such community....
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National Hispanic Heritage Month (SCPL)
National Hispanic Heritage Month - Adult
OBD Best Books of 2021 (BookPage) - Adult
TFML Hispanic Heritage Month
National Hispanic Heritage Month - Adult
OBD Best Books of 2021 (BookPage) - Adult
TFML Hispanic Heritage Month
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"Quiara Alegría Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced in her grandmother's tight South Philly kitchen, "frizzy hair cut short, bangs teased into stiff clouds, sweat glistening in the summer fog, pamper-butt babies weaving between legs." Quiara was awed by her aunts and uncles and cousins, but haunted by the secrets of the family and the unspoken stories of the barrio -- even as she tried to find her own voice in the...
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English
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Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? In The Wayfinders, renowned anthropologist, winner of the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize, and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis leads us on a thrilling journey to celebrate the wisdom of the world's indigenous cultures. In Polynesia we set sail with navigators whose ancestors settled the Pacific ten centuries before Christ. In...
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English
Description
Who changed the sex of God? This groundbreaking book proposes that the rise of alphabetic literacy reconfigured the human brain and brought about profound changes in history, religion, and gender relations. Making remarkable connections across brain function, myth, and anthropology, Dr. Shlain shows why pre-literate cultures were principally informed by holistic, right-brain modes that venerated the Goddess, images, and feminine values. Writing drove...
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Description
"Charts the evolutionary origins of language, the social and cultural factors that govern its use, change, and development; as well as what it reveals about the human mind. In most communication, nonverbal cues are our emotional expression, signal our personality, and are our attitude toward our addressee. They provide the essential means of nuance and are essential to getting our ideas across. But in digital communication, these cues are missing,...
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English
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A bold and provocative study that presents language not as an innate component of the brain--as most linguists do--but as an essential tool unique to each culture worldwide. For years, the prevailing opinion among academics has been that language is embedded in our genes, existing as an innate and instinctual part of us. But linguist Daniel Everett argues that, like other tools, language was invented by humans and can be reinvented or lost. He shows...
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"Perhaps the finest and most profound account of ethnographic fieldwork and discovery that has ever entered the anthropological literature."
-The Wall Street Journal
"If you want to experience a profoundly different culture without the exhausting travel (to say nothing of the cost), this is an excellent choice."
-The Washington Post One of Time's 32 Books You Need to Read This Summer * One of National Geographic's Best Travel Books of Summer
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"In this incisive blend of personal narrative and deep philosophical and linguistic inquiry, journalist, filmmaker, and activist Barrett Holmes Pitner identifies a linguistic void in how we discuss race and culture in the United States. "Ethnocide," first coined in 1944 by Jewish exile Raphael Lemkin (who also coined the term genocide), describes the systemic erasure of a people's ancestral culture. Dating back to the cross-Atlantic slave trade and...
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