referencebooks

Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms

Margaretta Jolly, Editor

Published by Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001

This is a work in two volumes, measuring 8.5" by 11" and running to a total of 1090 pages, plus a preferatory section that includes an editor's note, information on the contributors, and an alphabetical and a categorized list of entries.

Here is the first paragraph of the "Editor's Note:"

The writing of lives is an ancient and ubiquitous practice. Biographies have been important as genealogical, religious, and didactic forms since the start of recorded literature. Autobiography, diaries, and personal letters have been widespread since the 18th century. But in the postmodern era the story of a life has seemed to demand explanation in a new way. As the individualism unleashed by capitalism cracks and reshapes in the fire of globalization and the communications revolution, a literature that foregrounds the shape of a single life and its span seems to focus the anxieties of the age. Life writing is now being explored in literary criticism, anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, theology, cultural studies, and even the biological sciences in order to explain an apparent dissolution of life into story. Just as busy is the investigation into our continuing need for stories that confirm or reinvent a reference to lived experience. The academic imagination has been galvanized by the challenges this has offered to its own epistemological traditions and by the democratizing of knowledge that life writing so charismatically represents.

The book aims to give an overview of biographical genres and themes; to give international and historic perspective on life writing; to discuss important writers and works; and to provide a little relevant background from the various academic disciplines where life writing is being looked at.

Here is a list of the full list of entries in the "E" section:

• Eckermann, Johann
  
• Edel, Leon
  
• Edmond, Lauris
  
• Edwards, Jonathan
  
• Elegies
  
• Ellmann, Richard
  
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo
  
• Epistolary Fiction
  
• Epistolary Poetry
  
• Epitaphs
  
• Equiano, Olaudah
  
• Erasmus, Desiderius
  
• Ethics
  
• Ethnicity, Race, and Life Writing
  
• Ethnography
  
• Evelyn, John
  
• Ewald, Johannes
  
• Exemplary and Model Lives
  
• Exploration Writings
  

Opening the first volume at random, I am looking at the entry for Jill Ker Conway and the first part of the entry for Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur, as well as the last part an article on "Conversion and Turning Points," which is about a page and a half long. Jill Ker Conway's entry is just over a page in length, including the longish, smaller-print biobraphy and bibliography. Conway is a major living academic and autobiographer, and an Australian expatriat living in the U.S. Her entry mostly discusses her autobiographical works and sketches out their place in the literary scene. Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur was an 18th and 19th century writer who is known primarily for Letters from an American Farmer, which was an important work in the formation of the American identity. Though the focus of that work was not the writer's own life as much as it was his newly adopted nation, in it he dealt with a number of questions that are central in the study of life writing and even to thinking about identity.

This is a very useful work for students of literature who are interested in autobiographical and biographical forms.

The Poet's Dictionary: A Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices

By William Packard

Published by HarperPerennial, 1989.

This is a mass-market paperback measuring 5" by 8" and running to 221 pages including a brief appendix on how to submit a poetry manuscript for publication, a brief bibliography, and a section acknowledging the copyright status of works used as examples, plus a foreword and a preface.

There are more thorough dictionaries of poetry and prosody out there, mostly aimed at a more academic audience than this one. This is a handy, not-too-long book designed with the aim of being easy-to-use for its audience of casual poets. The author says in his preface, after describing some of the other works and what is wrong with them:

"I began to feel that what was really needed was a single-volume poetry dictionary where a reader/writer could find brief and accurate definitions of the various poetic devices, together with a larger overview of the uses of these devices from the entire range of master poems of world poetry."

So, a special feature of this book is that it is rich with textual illustrations, sections of poetry which exemplify the poetic terms defined.

Relatively few terms are defined, and definitions are lengthy given the small size of the book. Much is left out that students of poetics would be interested in. Here is a list of the first fifteen terms defined in the book:

• ACCENT
  
• ALEXANDRINE
  
• ALLITERATION
  
• ANAPEST (See METER)
  
• ANAPHORA
  
• APOSTROPHE
  
• ASSONANCE
  
• BALLAD
  
• BALLADE
  
• BLANK VERSE
  
• CACAPHONY
  
• CAESURA
  
• CANZONE
  
• CAPITALIZATION
  
• CAROL
  

Entries range in length from a paragraph to several pages. The poetic examples make up a large part of what is in the book, contributing to its being a good book to sit down and spend some time with. More a reference book for the everyday poet than the serious student, it's still a useful reference book.

International Education Quotations Encyclopaedia

By Keith Allan Noble

Published by Open University Press, 1995

This is a 6" by 9" clothbound book running to 381 pages including the author index, plus a preferatory section.

The Prologue says of the book,

"Spanning serveral millenia, it contains nearly 2700 education related quotations. They were carefully chosen from disparate sources and represent the thoughts of over 1300 people. These quotations come from ancient oriental philosophers; the sages of the Middle East; Greek and Roman scholars; thinkers from the Renaissance and Reformation; Napoleonic-era authors; 19th- and 20th-century writers; and those now pondering the next century."

This is indeed an unusually extensive, as well as well-organized, subject-oriented collection of quotations. The quotations come from thinkers in all intellectual spheres - not just education theorists but philosophers, artists, political thinkers, scientists, religious thinkers, playwrights, and others. The book is organized into numerous topical headings; the "H" sequence has these fifteen:

• HALF-TRUTH
  
• HAPPINESS
  
• HEALTH EDUCATION
  
• HIGHER EDUCATION
  
• HIPPOCRATIC OATH
  
• HISTORIAN
  
• HISTORY
  
• HOME SCHOOLING
  
• HOMEWORK
  
• HONESTY
  
• HONORARY DEGREE
  
• HUBRIS
  
• HUMANISM
  
• HUNGER
  
• HYPOCRACY
  

As you can see from this list, the book covers a broad range of topics that should be of interest to more than just educators. Here are a few quotations lifted from the book:

CRITICAL THINKING
Critical thinkers can be parodied either as disgruntled and bitter subversives, or as elitist mockers of others' well-meant efforts. The pejorative associations surrounding the word critical have meant that advocating critical thinking is a form of social and educational bad taste.
- STEPHEN D. BROOKFIELD; Developing Critical Thinkers, 1987

EDUCATE
A number of people who are essentially ignorant now have degrees and diplomas to certify that they are educated. These people either know how ignorant they are, and thus realize education is a fraud, or they go around saying they are just as good as everybody else. Ignorance is curable. Stupidity is not.
- JOHN CIARDI; Waco Tribune-Herald, 18 Mar. 1976

TELEVISION
One is entirely justified in saying that the major educational enterprise now being undertaken in the United States is not happening in its classrooms but in the home, in front of the television set, and under the jurisdiction not of school administrators and teachers but of network executives and entertainers.
- NEIL POSTMAN; Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985

CHILDREN
Children are overwhelming, supercilious, passionate, envious, inquisitive, egotistical, idle, fickle, timid, intemperate, liars, and dissemblers; they laugh and weep easily, are excessive in their joys and sorrows, and that about the most trifling subject; they bear no pain, but like to inflict it on others; already they are men.
(JEAN DE) LA BRUYÈRE; Les Charactères, 1688

This is an unusually well-done collection of quotations, of use to anyone who writes or speaks about education or who wants some entertaining reading.

The Oxford Dictionary of Plays

By Michael Patterson

Published by Oxford University Press, 2005

This is a 6" by 9", black clothbound book running to 523 pages including an index of characters and an index of playwrights, plus a classified list of included plays, a preface and a brief bibliography.

The preface begins, "This volume sets out to provide useful information and brief commentaries on the 1,000 most significant plays of world theatre." Plays from around the world are included, but it's the English speaking audience that's considered in determining what plays to include; the date of first translation into English is always included for plays in translation and plays from anglophone countries are given extra weight.

1,000 plays to represent world theatre from its beginning to the present is not many. The editor had to be a little brutal in deciding what to exclude. The result is a handy, compact volume that many will find incomplete.

For each included play, where relevant, entries provide a title; alternative titles when existent (mainly for different translations); date and place of first performance; date of first publication; date of translation into English; genre (with terms explained in the preface); setting and time of action; composition of cast; and a couple of paragraphs giving a synopsis and some commentary. Most entries are around a half a page long. They are arranged in alphabetical order by title and not divided into sections by time period or geography.

The synopses and commentary are light and fun to read for an OUP reference book, making me more interested in the plays they talk about.

This is a useful and entertaining reference book, good for readers and theatre lovers both.

An Encyclopedia of Quotations About Music

Compiled by Nat Shapiro.

Published by Da Capo Press, 1981.

This is a 6" by 9" paperback running to 418 pages including the index of names and sources and the index of key words and phrases, plus a brief introduction.

This paperback edition is a reprint of the original 1978 book, which makes it a little moldy, considering how much music and talk about music there have been since then. Still, it's a nice collection of quotations about music, drawn roughly equally from general literature and the writings and sayings of composers and musicians.

The book is divided into eight parts with about 45 sub-parts. The eight main sections, with some sample subsections in parentheses, are:

1. Creators and Components (Melody, Harmony and Rhythm; Composers and Composition; the Avant Garde)
   
2. Exponents (Conductors and Conducting; Instruments and Instrumentalists; Concerts)
   
3. Proponents and Opponents (Critics and Criticism; Musical Misanthopy)
   
4. Lift Every Voice (Words and/with/for/to Music; The Wings of Song; Singing and Singers)
   
5. The Universal Art (Emotions, Vapors and Dispositions; The Food of Love; The Lingering Melody; Solitude; Tones in Time; The Soul of a Nation; The Open-Air Art)
   
6. Music for the Millions (Jazz; Blues and Blacks; Popular and Light; Folk; Dance)
   
7. Metaphysics, Metaphor and Miscellany (The Music of the Spheres; Music as Metaphor; Proverbs, Aphorisms, Wordplay, and Assorted Musical Saws)
   

Here are a couple of random samples:

Nothing is so truly bounded and obedient to law as music, yet nothing so surely breaks all petty and narrow bonds.
- Henry David Thoreau
Journal 1854

Jazz may be thought of as a current that bubbled forth from a spring in the slums of New Orleans to become the main spring of the twentieth century.
- Henry Pleasants (1910- )
News summaries, December 30, 1955

Flute, n. A Variously perforated hollow stick intended for the punishment of sin, the minister of retribution being commonly a young man with straw-colored eyes and lean hair.
- Ambrose Bierce
The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary

Good singing is often wearisome.
French proverb, c. 1498

I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly, discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.
- Oscar Wilde
The Critic as Artist 1891

Archetypes and Motifs in Folklore and Literature: A Handbook

Jane Garry and Hasan El-Shamy, Editors

Published by M.E. Sharpe, 2005.

This is a 7" by 9.5" hardcover book running to 515 pages including the index, plus thirty-five pages of preferatory material, including a preface, an introduction, a "how to use this book" section, a list of illustrations, and a brief bios of the editors and contributors.

As a handbook, this book presents a series of essays intended to cover the territory of the book's subject matter. The introduction defines a motif as a small narrative unit recurrent in folk literature. The essays in this book are divided into sections marked by letters of the alphabet, which key the motifs discussed to the classic work by Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature. The first few sections are:

• A. Mythological Motifs (10 essays)
  
• B. Mythical Animals (5 essays)
  
• C. Tabu (4 essays)
  
• D. Magic (8 essays)
  
• E. The Dead (1 essay)
  
• F. Marvels (4 essays)
  
• G. Ogres (1 essay)
  
• H. Tests (4 essays)
  
• J. The Wise and the Foolish (1 essay)
  
• K. Deceptions (4 essays)
  

The book looks at motifs in folk literature cross-culturally, but does not make the Romantic assumption that motifs occurring in different cultures represent universals (despite the presence of the word "archetype" in the title). Instead, it compares and contrasts the uses of a given motif in different cultures.

Opening the book at random, I'm in in the section on The Dead, in the chapter, "Ghosts and Other Revenants," looking at the headings, "The Grateful Dead," "The Vanishing Hitchhiker," and "Why Those Who Die Do Not Return To Life." I thought the Grateful Dead was just a country rock band (well, not JUST a country rock, band, but still, a country rock band), but it is a motif in folklore, probably originating in the Hebrew story of Tobit, where someone generously pays the debts of a dead man so that his corpse can be buried, and then is aided by the ghost of the dead man, who comes in the form of an old man, a servent, or a fox. At the end of this chapter is a section of references that includes citations to 12 books about motifs of ghosts and other revenants. The prose is easy to read and informative.

This is a fascinating and useful book.

2006 Poet's Market

Nancy Breen, Editor.

Published by Writer's Digest Books, 2006.

This is a 7" by 9" book running to 572 pages including the indexes (general and special).

The cover says:

WHERE AND HOW TO PUBLISH YOUR POETRY

1,800+ listings for magazines and journals, presses, contests, workshops, and more

Includes exclusive interviews with poets and editors on the craft of poetry.

This is simply the best and most complete guide for people wanting to publish their poetry. It is divided into four major sections: Articles & Information, Markets (which has the bulk of the book, a directory of publishers of poetry), Resources, and Indexes. The Articles & Information section includes:

• Getting Started (and Using This Book)
  
• Frequently Asked Questions
  
• Roundtable: Poetry Contests
  
• Opening Doors to Poetry
  
• Mistakes Poets Make
  
• Dealing With Problem Editors
  
• Complaint Procedure
  
• Are You Being Taken?
  
• Self-Promotion
  
• Important Market Listing Information
  

The directory of poetry publishers lists publishers in alphabetical order. Entries include small icons that indicate aspects of the publisher's operation - whether it's in another country, whether they pay money (and not just free copies of the publication), whether they welcome submissions from beginning poets, etc. For each publisher listed there is contact information, information on what kind of poetry the publisher publishes, information about its market and the physical product, statistics on the number of submissions they get versus how many they publish, distribution and price information, instructions on how to submit, and various other information, sometimes including statements by the editors of the magazine or book publisher on such things as the state of poetry today, pet peeves, or tips on writing.

The section called Resources contains directories of conferences & workshops, organizations, poets in education, and glossaries of listing terms and poetry terms. The index section includes an index of chapbook publishers, book publishers, an index based on openness to submission, a geographical index, a subject index, and a general index.

This is an indispensible book for poets who are serious about writing poetry and want to explore their publishing options. This is the 21st annual edition of the book.

The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia

By Kenneth Lantz

Greenwood Press, 2004.

This is a 7" by 10" hardbound book running to 499 pages including the index, plus alphabetical and topical lists of entries, a preface, and a chronology. The book is printed in easy-on-the-eyes large type, in two columns.

The preface says the book is for students new to Dostoevsky as well for specialists, and then goes on to describe what's in the book:

Entries are provided on the most significant aspects of Dostoevsky's life and career. Each of his fictional works is discussed, as are his major pieces of journalism. There are entries for members of his family, his close friends and associates, places where he lived, literary movements with which he is associated, and literary journals and newspapers in which he published or that are mentioned in his works. Included as well are major writers and thinkers, Russian and European, who influenced his thought and his fiction. I also discuss his central ideas and the major themes of his writings. Space does not allow any systematic account of the contemporary response to his work nor of his posthumous critical reception.

Opening the book at random, I'm looking at the entry for Dmitry Vasilevich Grigorovich (1822-1899), a writer and a friend of Dostoevsky. This entry is about one full page in length and gives a bare-bones literary biography of the man and a discussion of his friendship with Dostoevsky and his importance in his life, mentioning also that much information about Dostoevsky can be found in his memoirs. Though it's a short entry, it does include a few interesting details. It finishes with references to three books.

This is a rich resource for anyone interested in Dostoevsky.

A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery

By Lyndy Abraham

Published by Cambridge University Press, 1998.

This is a thin, 7" by 10" clothbound book. It runs to 249 pages including the bibliography and index of alchemical and literary authors, plus a list of figures, abbreviations, and a substantial introduction. The type is fairly small, and the margins (left margins on both left and right pages) are large and hold the entry titles.

The book is what its title says it is - a dictionary of alchemical imagery. However, a little more needs to be known about it to make use of it. Unlike many subject-oriented dictionaries, this one does not serve as an accessible introduction to the field. The entries, which can be for either terms from alchemy (processes, concepts) or names of objects used, are written for an audience that is already familiar with alchemical literature. For example, here is the the entry for sol niger:

sol niger (the black sun), symbol of the death and putrefaction of the metal, or of united *sulfur and *argent vive at the *nigredo, the initial stage of the opus alchymicum (see chemical wedding) (see fig. 38). At the nigredo the metal or matter for the Stone is 'killed' and dissolved into its *prima materia so that it may be resurrected in a new form. At the death of the matter, darkness reigns. The light of the sun (gold) is said to be put out, totally eclipsed (see eclipse). Artephius wrote: 'But first this Sol by putrefaction and resolution in this water, loseth all its light or brightneess and will grow dark and black' (SB, 4).

Asterisks in the above entry indicate terms discussed elsewhere in the book.

Contemporary interest in alchemy tends to be literary, psychological and spiritual; no one today believes in it the way the alchemists did, but find humanistic significance in what they were up to. Carl Jung's approach to it in his Mysterium Conjunctionis is instructive (though that book is not listed in the bibliography of this dictionary). So this book, which is classified in the PN's in our collection, could be of use to students of literature, history, religion, psychology, or, because of the focus on imagery, art. It's an interesting book but one that would have to be used by someone with background knowledge or in conjunction with a more introductory text.

African-American Writers: A Dictionary

Edited by Shari Dorantes Hatch and Michael R. Strickland

Published by ABC-CLIO, 2000.

This is a 7" by 10" hardbound book running to 484 pages including a list of the writers by genre, a chronology of writers, a chronology of historic "firsts" in African American literature, the bibliography and the index, plus a brief foreword, preface, and acknowledgments.

This is a straightforward literary dictionary of African-American writers, covering individuals who created or create poems, plays, short stories, novels, essays, opinion pieces, and other works. There are hundreds of writers included. Entries range in length from brief paragraphs on a two-column page to several pages.

The preface describes an interesting strength of the book:

You can also use our encyclopedia to find out some of the interesting connections among authors. For instance, what are some of the common characteristics and distinctive aspects of the narratives of former slaves? Which African-American writers were helped by the 1930's-era Federal Writers Project? Which writers were influenced by a distinctive region such as rural Mississippi or urban Detroit? Which writers were orphaned at a tender age? Which writers had to overcome tremendous economic and social hardships in order to put pen to paper? How did it affect writers to have particularly light skin and European facial features? Which writers mentored a series of contemporary writers? Which writers put their careers on hold while they stopped to raise children - their own or those of others - and which writers started writing as a means of supporting their children?..."

The index can be helpful in uncovering these links, but many require spending quality time with the book in order to reveal them.

Opening the book at random, I'm at page 155, looking at the entry for Lorraine (Vivian) Hansberry, which runs for two and a half pages and has a publicity photo. The entry is very informative, going into interesting biographical detail about her background as well as her political activities, in addition to her literary contributions.

This is a very useful book.

The Big Book of Business Quotations

Copyright Bloomsbury Publishing, 2003. No other author/editor credit is given.

Published by Basic Books, 2003.

This is a 7" by 9" paperback book running to 454 pages including a rich keyword and author index, plus a list of categories and a brief note to readers.

As a collection of quotations, this is a rather interesting one. It's longer and more diverse than average, drawing on the words of not just business executives but also politicians, social critics and other notable figures. The quotations are offered as a "source of thoughts and advice for presentations, reports, and speeches" in the day to day life of business people (and business students, of course). They seem to be chosen well to illustrate arguments that a business person might be trying to make, about his company, his plan, his services, etc. Accordingly, the 150 subjects covered include Economics, Efficiency, Employees, Employers, Enthusiasm, Entrepreneurs, Excellence, and Executives, but not Ethics. (It doesn't include Morality, either, but to be fair, it does include Conscience, Honesty, Corporate Responsibility, and Corruption and Scandal.)

There are over 5,000 quotations in the book, from over 1,500 authors. A strength of the book is that the quotations are well cited, giving the name and birthdate of the author, a statement indicating something about who they were or are, and the title and publication date of the source.

Here are three randomly selected quotations from the book.

From the section on "Publicity:"

Silence is the virtue of fools.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) English philosopher and statesman. De Dignitiate et Augmentis Scientiarium

From the section on "Money:"

I've always had a place for every dollar that came in. I've never seen the day where I could say that I felt rich. Generally you have to worry about paying the bills.
J. Paul Getty (1892-1976) U.S. entrepreneur, oil industry executive, and financier. Interview, Evening Standard [London] (February 11, 1974)

From the section on "Criticism:"

A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
Adlai E. Stevenson (1900-1965) U.S. statesman and author. Speech (October 1952)

The Quotable Gardener

By Kathy Ishizuka.

Published by McGraw-Hill, 2001.

This is a 6" by 8.5" hardbound book running to 267 pages including the author index, plus a long table of contents and an introduction.

The Quotable Gardener is simply a specialized book of quotations about gardening. It is divided into numerous small, thematic sections, with titles like "Animals in the Garden," "Anticipation," "Beauty," "Bees and Butterflies," "Bonsai," "Boundaries," "Buds," "Bulbs," "Challenge/Failure," "City Gardens," "Compost," "Control," etc.

Many of the quotations can be read allegorically, and remind me of Chance the Gardener in Being There. There seems to be much unassuming wisdom to be found in the world of gardening.

Many of the quotes come from a British tradition of gardens in upper-class country estates, which some people enjoy reading, but might not relate that well to your average American middle-class gardener. They don't make up the majority of the selections, however.

Here are a couple of random quotes from the collection:

From the section titled "Surprise:"

One of the small delights of gardening, undramatic but recurring, is when phlox or columbines seed themselves in unplanned places. When trickles of creeping jenny soften stony outlines, or when Welsh poppies cram a corner with their brilliant cadmium yellow alongside the deep blue spires of Jacob's ladder, all arbitrarily seeding themselves like coloured smells about the place.
- Mirabel Osler, A Gentle Plea for Chaos, 1989

In the section titled "Seasons:"

People who are not gardeners always say that the bare beds of winter are uninteresting; gardeners know better, and take even a certain pleasure in the neatness of the newly dug, bare, brown earth.
- Vita Sackville-West, How Does Your Garden Grow?, 1935.

This is a nice, handy collection.

W.H. Auden Encyclopedia

By David Garrett Izzo.

Published by McFarland & Company, Inc., 2004.

This is a 7" by 10" hardcover book running to 296 pages including the preface, introduction, chronology and index.

The preface begins:

The plan of this volume is to provide a self-contained reference resource that could introduce Auden to those who know little of him, expand Auden to the reader of literature in general, refresh Auden to teachers of literature, and serve Auden scholars who can quickly be reminded of people, places, poems, essays, plays, libretti, influnces, and the myriad details that few - even Auden aficionados - can retain in that overburdened file cabinet called memory...

Opening the book at random, I'm on pages 202 and 203, in the middle of a ten-page article titled "Plays with Isherwood." This article talks about all of the plays on which Auden collaborated with Christopher Isherwood, giving attention to biographical details surrounding the writing process as well as the characters, action and meaning of the plays.

Opening the book again, I'm on pages 120 and 121, looking at a number of entries. The first is a one-sentence long entry on Samuel Hynes, who wrote a seminal study of Auden and his circle. Then we have entries for several of Auden's works, by title. These include essays and poems - entries ranging in length from five lines to nearly a page. On these pages there are also see references. One is from a poem's first line to the entry for the poem by its title; another is a see reference from "The 'I' Without a Self" to Kafka, Franz; and the last is from Icelandic Literature to Old Norse and Old English Literature.

The prose is pleasant reading and not as impersonal as typical reference books. It contains substantial detail on Auden's literary career. It strikes me as a very helpful resource for someone studying W.H. Auden.

Dictionary of Semiotics

By Bronwen Martin and Felizitas Ringham.

Published by Cassell, 2000. Copyright held by the authors.

This is a small paperback measuring 6" by 8.25" and running to 177 pages including the index, introduction, bibliography, and a sample semiotic analysis of Sleeping Beauty.

This book intends to be an introduction to semiotic theory in dictionary form. The introduction talks about what semiotics is, goes a bit into its history, and then talks about its use as a tool for analysis.

The dictionary itself provides definitions of terms in semiotic theory, usually a couple of short paragraphs long, but sometimes longer.

The first fifteen entries in the book are for:

• Absence
  
• Abstract
  
• Achrony
  
• Acquisition
  
• Actant
  
• Actantial narrative schema
  
• Action
  
• Actor
  
• Actorialization
  
• Actualization
  
• Adjudicator
  
• Aesthetics
  
• Agent
  
• Alethic modalities
  
• Anachronism
  

Since many of these entries represent specialized usages of common words, it wouldn't necessarily be obvious that one needed this book; it might just seem like you were dealing with writing that doesn't make sense. That there are more or less technical meanings in the way that these words are used in semiotics is one lesson of the book.

For an example of the kind of thing that is here, here is the full entry for "Spatialization," which is a brief entry:

Spatialization

The term spatialization designates the process whereby places and locations are established in discourse. Like actorialization and temporalization it is a necessary ingredient for a referential illusion or reality effect to work. In line with the temopral organization of discourse, spatial structuring serves the installation of narrative programmes and their sequence. Stages of Little Red Riding Hood's mission are thus linked to (1) her mother's house; (2) the wood; (3) her grandmother's house.

A subject dictionary is usually handy as a reference to the meaning of a specialized term. This one is really not very useful in that way, because to understand the meaning of a term in semiotic theory you have to understand semiotic theory, and will therefore find yourself reading the whole book. That means that this is really a dictionary that must be read cover to cover. As such it's a pretty interesting introduction to semiotics.

The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs

Edited by Jennifer Speake.

Published by Oxford University Press, 2003.

This is a 5.5" by 8.5" clothbound book running to 375 pages including a thematic bibliography and an index, plus an introduction and list of abbreviations.

The introduction says, "The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (sic; title is not "Concise" on the title page) provides a general history of proverbs in common use in Britain in the last two hundred years." It later defines a proverb as "a traditional saying which offers advice or presents a moral in a short and pithy manner."

This dictionary presents proverbs in the alphabetic sequence of the first significant word (omitting words like "a," "every," "one," etc.). Numerous cross-references are added to the sequence.

For each proverb, the earliest known example of its use in literature (in any verbal formulation) is given, followed by some other examples (in the style of the Oxford English Dictionary) to show how the use of the proverb in context has changed over time. Additionally, proverbs are given some notes to explain aspects of meaning or to indicate an original source of the proverb outside of English literature (Old French, the Bible, etc.).

The basis of this dictionary is proverbs presently used in British culture, but the book includes common proverbs that originated in the United States as well, like, "There is no such thing as a free lunch" and "Different strokes for different folks."

This is a handy and well-done reference book.

Word by Word Translations of Songs and Arias

Part I - German and French:
By Berton Coffin, Werner Singer, Pierre Delattre
Published by Scarecrow Press, 1966

Part II - Italian
By Arthur Schoep and Daniel Harris
Published by Scarecrow Press, 1972

This is a work in two separately published volumes measuring 5.5" by 8.5" and running to 620 and 563 pages respectively, including the indexes.

As the title says, the two volumes provide word-by-word translations of songs and arias from opera and classical choral music. The purpose of it is to give singers a way of knowing the meaning of what they're singing, so that they can add appropriate emotional tones to their performance.

The books are arranged in alphabetical order by composer and then song, using the song titles from the original languages. This can make it hard to look up a translation if you don't know enough information about it. For instance, if I want a translation to the words of that poem by Schiller used in Beethoven's 9th Symphony, "Ode to Joy" will not get you to it. (Actually, browsing through the section on Beethoven, I think that one is not in the book anyway.)

Since the purpose of the book is to provide word-for-word transations rather than translations of sentences based on meaning, the result is awkward reading, but useful for singers. Here is an example,

Schubert

An die Nachtigall
To the nightingale

Er liegt und schläft an meinem Herzen,
He lies and sleeps at my heart,

mein guter Schutzgeist sang ihn ein,
my good guardian spirit (guardian angel) sang him [in] (to sleep),

und ich kann fröhlich sein und scherzen,
and I can cheerful be and jest,

kann jeder Blum und jedes Blatts much freun.
can (of) each flower and each leaf [me] rejoice.

Nachtigall, ach! Nachtigall, ach!
Nightingale, ah! Nightingale, ah!

sing mir den Amor nicht wach!
sing (me the) Cupid not awake!
(do not awaken Cupid with your song)

Famous Last Words

Edited by Barnaby Conrad

Published by Doubleday, 1961.

This is a 5.5" by 8" clothbound book running to 208 pages, plus a foreword.

I am not going to compare this book to similar books, of which there have been many published over the years, perhaps some better.

It is a compilation of the last words, uttered on the deathbed or the battlefield, or sometimes by written note, of numerous famous people who have died. The book has about a half dozen quotations to a page. Since its scope includes anyone who was notable and its size is small, its serviceability as a reference book for looking up the last words of any famous dead person is very limited, and it shows the desireability of a similar but more comprehensive work. That said, it makes thought-provoking reading and is good for a lot of morbid laughs.

Entries give the name and career of the person listed, followed in some cases by a description of their situation at death or the context of their last words (often necessary to make sense of the quote) and then their final sentences.

Here are a few examples:

ARCHIMEDES 287 B.C.1212 B.C.
When the city of Syracuse was taken by the Romans, Archimedes was discovered in the market place contemplating some figures he had drawn in the sand. A Roman soldier approached him and he spoke: "Stand away, fellow, from my diagram!" He was then killed.

BOUHOURS, DOMINIQUE 1682-1702
A grammarian. "I am about to -- or I am going to -- die: either expression is used."

BROWN, JOHN 1800-1859
A willing martyr to the antislavery cause, he was asked if he was tired while standing on the scaffold. "No, but don't keep me waiting longer than necessary."

HEGEL, GEORG WILHELM 1770-1831
The German philosopher said: "Only one man ever understood me." Then he paused and said: "And he didn't understand me."

Okay, I can't resist - I will compare it to another book of dying words. In our library we have a book from 1955 titled Dictionary of Last Words. It provides less context for the quotations, and the quotations selected are less interesting and less often ironic. The editor of Famous Last Words appreciated the beauty of the context of death for an historic quotation. In some places the two books disagree about what a person's last words were. In the 1955 book, Voltaire is said to have uttered, "Adieu, my dear Morand, I am dying." In Famous Last Words there is no mention of this quotation, and Voltaire says to the Priest who has come to save his soul, "In the name of God, let me die in peace!" Unfortunately, sources aren't given at all in Famous Last Words and are only given in a separate bibliography in the older book, with no reference to which quotations which works are supporting.

This is a fun book, but in a number of ways suggests what a better one would be like (much longer, inclusive of alternative views, and with sources well-cited). Let me know if you know of such a book.

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, co-editors.

Published by Princeton University Press, 1993.

This is a chunky, 6.5" by 9.5" clothbound book running to 1383 pages, plus 46 pages of preferatory material.

The preface begins,

"This is a book of knowledge, of facts, theories, questions, and informed judgment, about poetry. Its aim is to provide a comprehensive, comparative, reasonably advanced, yet readable reference for all students, teachers, scholars, poets, or general readers who are interested in the history of any poetry in any national literature of the world, or in any aspect of the technique or criticism of poetry. It provides surveys of 106 national poetries; descriptions of poetic forms and genres major and minor, traditional and emergent; detailed explanations of the devices of prosody and rhetoric; and overviews of all major schools of poetry ancient and modern, Western and Eastern. It provides balanced and comprehensive accounts of the major movements and issues in criticism and literary theory, and discussion of the manifold relations of poetry to the other fields of human thought and activity -- history, science, politics, religion, philosophy, music, the visual arts."

That's a great ambition; a little browsing and reading shows that they seem to have lived up to it. This is indeed a deep and wide-reaching yet readable reference book about everything to do with poetry, a must have for an academic library collection.

The first twenty entries in the "R" sequence, including see references, are:

• RAGUSAN POETRY (SEE YUGOSLAV POETRY)
  
• RASA (SEE INDIAN POETICS)
  
• RAZOS (SEE VIDAS AND RAZOS)
  
• READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM
  
• RECANTATION (SEE PALINODE; RECUSATIO)
  
• RECEPTION THEORY (SEE READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM)
  
• RECESSION OF ACCENT (SEE ACCENT)
  
• RECIPROCUS VERSUS (SEE PALINDROME)
  
• RÉCIT (SEE PLOT)
  
• RECOGNITION (SEE PLOT)
  
• REDERIJKERS
  
• REDONDILLA
  
• REFERENCE (multiple see references)
  
• REFRAIN
  
• REFRÁN
  
• REFREIN
  
• REGULATED VERSE (SEE CHINESE POETRY)
  
• REIZIANUM (SEE TELESILLEUM; AEOLIC)
  
• REJET
  
• RELATIVE STRESS PRINCIPLE
  

Articles can be several pages in length or just a paragraph long. Entries stress the history of poetics in many instances.

This is an excellent reference work on poetry and poetics, useful for looking up information or just reading to learn from.

The International Handbook on Innovation

Edited by Larisa V. Shavinina.

Published by Elsevier Science on their Pergamon imprint, 2003.

This is a very heavy 7" by 10" hardbound book, running to 1171 pages of slick paper including the author and subject indexes, plus a long table of contents section, acknowledgments, contributors' bios, and a preface.

This book covers recent research on innovation, mainly from an industrial psychology perspective, but drawing on many disciplines. The introduction says,

"The purpose of the handbook is multifold: (a) to pose critical questions and issues that need to be addressed by research in a given subfield of innovation; (b) to review and evaluate recent contributions in the field; (c) to present new approaches to understanding innovation; and (d) to indicate lines of inquiry that have been, and are, likely to continue to be valuable to pursue. This handbook does not provide the kind of literature reviews usually found in textbooks. The conventional understanding of a handbook -- as a compendium of review chapters suggesting a guide to practice -- seems to be very restricted in the context of the field of innovation. The 'handbook' title suggests a guide to practice only in cases where the body of knowledge is understood to be complete and more or less unchanging. For example, 'Handbook of Mathematical Formulae', or 'Handbook of Motorcycle Repair'. However, the study of innovation is a body of knowledge under dynamic theoretical development, and so I prefer to use the 'International Handbook on Innovation' instead of the 'International Handbook of Innovation'. I hope readers will find the present chapters lively and provocative, stimulating greater interest in the science of innovation."

The book is classified in the BF's in our library, based on the judgment, following LC's subject tracings, that it is mostly about the personal qualities underlying innovativeness. While it is about that, it is really more about innovation as something that can be pursued by companies, research organizations and educational or cultural institutions in a deliberate, managed way, and therefore might be more appropriately classified in some other way. It is, I grant, not easy to classify well.

The book is divided into fifteen parts, each with a number of chapters. The fifteen parts are:

1. INTRODUCTION
   
2. THE NATURE OF INNOVATION
   
3. INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN INNOVATIVE ABILITY
   
4. DEVELOPMENT OF INNOVATION ACROSS THE LIFE SPAN
   
5. ASSESSMENT OF INNOVATION
   
6. DEVELOPMENT OF INNOVATION
   
7. INNOVATIONS IN DIFFERENT DOMAINS
   
8. BASIC APPROACHES TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF INNOVATION IN SOCIAL CONTEXT
   
9. INNOVATIONS IN SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
   
10. INNOVATION IN MANAGEMENT
    
11. INNOVATION LEADERSHIP
    
12. INNOVATION AND MARKETING
    
13. INNOVATION AROUND THE WORLD: EXAMPLES OF COUNTRY EFFORTS, POLICIES, PRACTICES AND ISSUES
    
14. INNOVATIONS OF THE FUTURE
    
15. CONCLUSION
    

This review is getting a little long, but I really want to share the chapter titles under "Innovations in Different Domains" for a sense of the scope of the book:

1. Dimensions of Scientific Innovation
   
2. Do Radical Discoveries Require Ontological Shifts?
   
3. Understanding Scientific Innovation: The Case of Nobel Laureates
   
4. Innovation in the Social Sciences: Herbert A. Simon and the Birth of a Research Tradition
   
5. Poetic Innovation
   
6. Directions for Innovation in Music Education: Integrating Conceptions of Musical Giftedness into General Educational Practice and Enhancing Innovation on the Part of Musically Gifted Students
   
7. Determinants of Technological Innovation: Current Research Trends and Future Prospects
   
8. Innovation in Financial Services Infrastructure
   
9. Innovation in Integrated Electronics and Related Technologies: Experiences with Industrial-Sponsored Large-Scale Multidisciplinary Programs and Single Investigator Programs in a Research University
   

Before seeing this book I had never considered that the phenomenon of innovation itself could be studied as a science. The book makes up an impressive collection of evidence that a real beginning has been made to a science of innovation. Precisely because innovation involves creativity at its core and anything that can be put in terms of static scientific principles or laws seems to be, well, something other than creativity, the idea of a science of innovation seems counter-intuitive. But browsing through the book shows that there is much that we can learn about innovation, how it comes about, and how to foster it.

This is a useful book for people who see themselves as innovators or want to study how to foster innovation in their own organizations.

A Dictionary of Stylistics

By Katie Wales

Published by Longman, 1990.

This is a 6" by 9" paperback book running to 504 pages including the bibliography, plus a brief introduction.

Stylistics is a relatively new area of linguistics having to do with analysis of style in texts. According to this book's introduction, it's a cross-disciplinary field, incorporating vocabulary from discourse analysis, text linguistics, contemporary literary theory, communication theory, as well as traditional linguistics and literary theory and other related fields. The introduction says, "This book is ... designed both as a dictionary and as a guide-book: not only to explain the meaning of terms, but also overall to give a general picture of the nature and aims of stylistics, its approaches, methodologies and insights, its historical origins and potential developments, in the hopes of facilitating and stimulating further study." It is primarily aimed at undergraduates in introductory courses in stylistics or literary studies; for grad students; and for foreign students and English teachers engaged in the analysis of written and spoken language.

For a sense of what's included, the first fifteen entries in the dictionary, which cover eight pages, are:

• a-verse
  
• aberrant decoding
  
• absence
  
• absolute clause
  
• abstract nouns
  
• absurd, theatre of the
  
• accent; accentuation
  
• acceptability
  
• acronym
  
• act
  
• actant
  
• actant
  
• action; actional code
  
• active
  
• actualiztion
  

The entry for "act" runs to just over a half a page and gives four separate meanings: the division of a play or opera; the smallest unit of conversational behavior (in discourse analysis); the idea of a deed in narratology; and the activity of producing utterances within the context of teller, tale and reader in narration. In the introduction, the author points out that one purpose of the book is to help readers who encounter terms that are used in different ways in the different disciplines on which the study of stylistics relies. Giving multiple definitions of terms to show how they can be used differently in stylistics is a useful feature of the book.

As you can see, the book covers an extremely wide territory. Considering the breadth of its subject matter the book seems woefully incomplete in terms of the vocabulary that it includes and doesn't include. Why include just some grammatical terms and just some ideas from deconstruction theory, when many more could be relevant to the study of stylistics? To be fair to the author, her field of study is stylistics and she no doubt selected terms that were the most likely to be encountered.

Incomplete as the book may be, its entries are written well, illuminating subjects that often suffer from obscurity. Not much theoretical background is assumed.

This is a useful book for someone interested in stylistics or the study of texts in general.