More Pruning

[stoutfellow]

Continuing my attack on my to-get list, I placed another order with Amazon last night.

• Frederick Winsor, The Space Child's Mother Goose. One of the mentors of my youth, a dear old man named L. Gordon Plummer, introduced me to this book. I haven't seen hide nor hair of it in, literally, decades, but when sraun mentioned that it was coming back into print, I put it on my list and started keeping a lookout. It's silly, but - as I recall - quite fun.
• Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language. This was recommended by LanguageHat; as I understand it, it's a discussion of linguistic change and an attempt to explain such change. Way back when I studied this stuff in college, I was warned not to seek this kind of explanation, but I know that much has changed in linguistics in the last thirty years, so....
• Roger Woodard (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages. Maybe I shouldn't have bought this. One hundred fifty-five freaking dollars.... But it's a reference work, and they tend to be expensive; it does sound interesting. (There were two other reference works near the top of the list; I decided to push them further down.)
• Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. I dropped my subscription to The Economist some time back. One of the few reasons I have for regretting that is not having access to their reviews, which is where I read about this one. From the Amazon reviews, it sounds like it's a bit polemic (as if the title wasn't clue enough), strongly opposed to the BJP. Fine with me.
• Charles C. Mann, 1491. I have several books on Pre-Columbian America, but this one comes highly recommended.
• Seymour Martin Lipset, It Didn't Happen Here. I've read a couple of Lipset's works before - Political Man and American Exceptionalism - and found them enlightening. This is a discussion of the failure of socialism to take root in the United States, alone among the Western democracies.
• Jan Johnson-Smith, American Science Fiction TV. Just for fun.