When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge by K. David Harrison

By the year 2100, many linguists estimate, half of the world's 6,912 distinct languages will be extinct. At present, 548 of them retain fewer than ninety-nine speakers. We can expect to lose a language every ten days; and behind each of these disappearances lies a story of cultural loss, sadness...

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Richard Dawkins's new collection of delectable prose, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, is less an anthology of set pieces than a treasury: a series of short titbits designed to pique the reader's appetite, helping him to decide which science writers to investigate more deeply. It enables...

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In August 1971, the Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his team of investigators selected twenty-four young men to participate in their study of the psychology of imprisonment. The men, only a few of whom were students, had answered an ad placed in both the student newspaper and...

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The Russian expression "eto yozhu yasno" -- which broadly means "clear-cut", "straightforward" -- is a particularly appropriate description for the prose of Andrey Kurkov, who specializes in deceptively simplistic tales of the Ukrainian absurd. As something of a bonus, the phrase literally means...

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There is much fluttering in the dovecots of the deluded, and Christopher Hitchens is one of those responsible. Another is the philosopher A. C. Grayling. I recently shared a platform with both. We were to debate against a trio of, as it turned out, rather half-hearted religious apologists ("Of...

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One of the heart-warming things about the Victorians is how generous they were in their choice of heroes. The same bourgeois philistine could find himself one week worshipping an exotic Oriental dandy such as Benjamin Disraeli, and the next a manly Christian gentleman such as David Livingstone. In...

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Helon Habila set his first novel, Waiting for an Angel (2002), in the mid 1990s, in the Nigeria of Sani Abacha, the military dictator whose brutality led to his country's being suspended from the Commonwealth. The book's artful back-to front narrative begins when the journalist Lomba, imprisoned on ...

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Bernard-Henri Levy is the model of a modern French intellectual. He made his name in the 1970s by showing a nation of philosophers how trendy and relevant philosophy could be. His boldness (he almost single-handedly broke the stranglehold of Marxism on French thought), talent for self-promotion...

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[Ed. Note. This review discusses the contents and context of two books: The Caged Virgin and Shattering the Stereotypes.] In 1992, the Somali-born author of The Caged Virgin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, arrived in Holland as a refugee. She was granted citizenship in 1997, and in 2003 was elected to...

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Shortly before he died in 1985, Italo Calvino began a final work in which he meditated on the approaching millennium. His manuscript explored the multiple forms of fiction and the future of literature, but he chose to begin by intertwining the fate of the novel with the close of the millennium. "It ...

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