Mikhael
Maybe four and a half stars. I enjoyed this, and I am thankful to have grown up in a place where things actually got dark and bugs and wild animals and plants were part of everyday (or should I say everynight) life. I'm still on a nature high after visiting some national parks, so this was a good book to fuel that wonder. Only critiques are that she sometimes she tries too hard to be profound and edgy by romanticizing darkness, but like, duh humans aren't nocturnal animals so don't expect us to be as appreciative of the night as the day. I do appreciate that she came closer to balancing it yin-yang style at the end, dualism but make it circadian.
Read most of this on a flight, occasionally looking out over sunlit desert hills, pretty scenic. This is some rich poetry, and my biggest takeaway was I think my brother is an unintentional Taoist, which if Lao Tzu is to be believed, is the perfect kind. Do without doing; be without being(?)
Also Le Guin’s footnotes for almost every chapter were helpful and sometimes contained nuggets more valuable than the poems they comment on.
Also kept in my mind that “Tao” is the same word used to translate “Logos” in the famous John 1 passage. Makes for a sort of Jesus-centered mysticism of the Tao, about which I wanna read more in the future
Every chapter, I'm thinking to myself "so close!" In this book, Stavrakopoulou has a field day with ancient artefacts. Everything is of equal value, there's no notion of one description/artefact being more authoritative than another. That said, the pieces are still cool. The photos of idols, documents, paintings, mosaics, etc all remind me of my visit this past year to the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures in Chicago, where ancient people's beliefs are transmitted and almost certainly misinterpreted by us modern folks. Stavrakopoulou has amassed a ton of "evidence" in this book, but her story is sorely mistaken. She gets it right when in acknowledging God has a body; she gets it wrong in concluding it's a dead one. The most baller epilogue I've ever read synthesizes millenia of revelations of God's body, and yet, she doesn't have faith. She chalks up as mere stories the descriptions of the Son from thousands of years ago, failing to trust the prophecies and failing to see that her "ancient" God is actually the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow
Was gonna give this four stars, but honestly it's a great assemblage of articles on Basque language history, no real reason to deduct a full star
Brilliant and (for the most part) concise. I deduct one star because the editor must have forgotten their glasses in several sections.
Some stuff tracks. Some doesn't. Adger makes a lot of stuff clear/accessible on the surface, but enough poking around will probably reveal minimalism isn't enough to model language adequately.
really mixed bag, it's like some of the short stories were still dry and long and some of them were just right. I liked Lord Byron's “Darkness” and Su-Yee Lin's “Away They Go.” Wendy Nikel's “An Introvert at the End of the World” was pretty funny.
Read on a recommendation from a mentor. Very good book. Usually I try to read Scriptures as historical documents, but this helped me watch the gospel according to Mark as a play. Opened a lot of doors for analysis, highly recommend
Wow finally done and it only took a year, rip. Ties my interests of Basque and the Church together. My memory of Crucible-month in school is that women got the heavy judgment, but interestingly, the Basque witch hunts were about as egalitarian as it gets. Both men and women were accused, and if anyone was particularly marginalized, it was kids, both boys and girls. I pray nothing like this ever goes down again, but hey, people are crazy.
Three stars because it wasn't engaging enough to finish at a normal pace
Arguably more psychology than linguistics, but still does a great job with the breadth of field. One star off because of some unnecessary, gross simplifications (on the linguistics side at least). Very pretty design/pictures/layout too!
For the goals and the brevity of this book, it's excellent. Naturally, he writes from a place of low church evangelicalism, so there's not room to entertain every Catholic/Orthodox position, but when he does invite those conversations, he does so from a plain, well-cited stance. Everything is well-cited, which is another reason to like this book. This is a survey course, and each extra-biblical footnote is a prompt for more specific study on the things the reader doubts or just wants to know more about. I wish it were deeper, but again, not the goal.
Bought this last year in Bloomington but only just now got around to reading it bc Stuff You Should Know covered the classic comic
Good book for class. Tons of examples and stuff on most linguistic domains, but deducting a point for the glaring omission of historical and regional pragmatics
These were good, kinda like the first in the series of image-sourced devotionals. I got some inspiration for stuff to share with others, but there are only so many ways you can say “You're in a valley, and it's a metaphor for fear/distrust, but God has something good for you if you keep trekking”
comprehensive, each chapter was pretty segmented, with less comparison to other language changes than the other romance history book i read. again, big focus on phonology and morphosyntax, not really pragmatics.
Bizarre story, remarkable dialect (I'm not used to 1912 Kiwi English), not much else
Good for a dissertation assessment of eleven languages. Purely synchronic however, which makes sense for her OT framework. Leaves questions like the origin of divergence between dialects unanswered. She doesn't really consider exceptions to the Souletin Basque data, nor does she address epenthetic aspiration in loans and compounds. Still, comprehensive for a synchronic typology paper.
Oso ona! Marrazkiak barregarri lañoak dira
I even learned some new English words with this, e.g. spanner, shawm, ludo, and horse-mackerel
Only gripe is that, as in too many European languages, they call just about any pasta macaroni
Read this on recommendation from a friend who knows the author. The friend got a lot of insight from it, but he felt like I might not learn many new lessons. He was right. Most of the deconstruction of certainty and the reinforcement of humility in this book can be cultivated in a high school literature class, which is what happened for me. Even in the middle of rural, conservative Indiana, people really are learning to stop and just consider other folks' motivations and reevaluating how certainly we can assess the intent of an interlocutor. I have a hard time believing that this book will transform too many people. The people who are open to the idea of climbing out of certainty (while remaining confident) are probably not the ones who need to read this.
Instead, the people who would profit a lot from this book probably wouldn't take a recommendation to read a book of this one's nature. Kind of a catch-22. You can tell that's who Redstone is writing to because one in three pages includes some kind of COA, some defense of an abstraction because there are people who will miss the abstract point and zero in on the irl example.
Qué incómodo, o sea se siente mucho la presión y la desesperación de la mamá, pues no esperaba el final
For a textbook, pretty good. The Campbell one I'm reading is better though. I dig the lexical diffusion acknowledgement here, no neogrammarian blinders.