Trip of the Tongue by Elizabeth Little

The author is a language fanatic.  She likes to learn all types of languages.  She decided to travel around the United States to find areas where languages other than English are used commonly.

She started with a few of the Native American languages – Creek and Najavo – to illustrate why these languages are fading even when efforts are now being made to teach them.  For years the U.S. government’s official policy was to eradicate the language of the tribes.  For generations who were punished for speaking their languages, it is not desirable for them to teach their children a language that they were taught is “bad.”  Why would they want their children to be punished?  English proficiency is also required to make it in the larger society so that trumps native language learning.

The trip continues with looks at creoles in Louisiana and Miami, Gullah in South Carolina, Basque in Nevada, and Norwegian in the upper Midwest.  It ends with a look at the use of Spanish in the United States.

I’ve never understood why people who can speak another language don’t make it a priority to teach it to their children.  Even if they aren’t going to speak it full time any multilingualism is of benefit for their brains and their college applications.

When we were in France this fall we had a conversation with a waiter who was from Corsica.  He spoke French.  His wife is German.  Their only common language when they met was English.  Their children are being raised with all three languages.  He couldn’t understand why this isn’t standard in the U.S.  I don’t get it either.

My grandmother understood Polish but refused to speak it.  One of her sons-in-law tried to speak Polish with her and she wouldn’t.  She obviously understood him but refused to utter a word.  The husband was raised in a house with Italian speaking relatives.  He considers Italian his first language but doesn’t remember any of it because once his great-grandmothers died no one spoke the language anymore.

I listened to this on audio.  There are sometimes when comparing differences in languages where it sounded like there were charts in the book.  Listening to charts being read on audio is not fun.  Also, the narrator sounds like a very proper slightly older woman.  There is profanity in the book.  It sounded quite odd being read in such a cultured, calm, and soothing voice.

Review of Tomlinson Hill by Chris Tomlinson

Tomlinson Hill: Sons of Slaves, Sons of Slaveholders by Chris Tomlinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Nonfiction – audio

AP journalist Chris Tomlinson knew that his family had been early settlers in Texas and that they owned a plantation named Tomlinson Hill. He was taught to be proud of his ancestors and was told repeatedly by his grandfather that the family’s slaves loved them so much that when they were freed they took the Tomlinson name.

LaDanian Tomlinson grew up visiting his grandmother who lived on Tomlinson Hill. He thought that the area had been named for his family until he read a historical marker that discussed the plantation.

Chris had always wondered about the Tomlinsons who were descended from his family’s slaves. He first heard of LaDanian when he was making a name for himself playing college football and then followed that with a career in the NFL. He wondered if there was a connection.

Chris spent years reporting on racial conflicts in Africa. He decided to write about racial tensions closer to home by exploring the dynamics of the two Tomlinson families.

This book goes deep into Texas history. It focus more on the white family than the black family most likely because of the availability of historical records. Because I was listening to it on audio it could get confusing at times when I would start confusing people with similar first names and not have a way to refer back to previous chapters.

It veers away from a strict family history often and goes into the larger picture so it definitely reads more like a history textbook than a family saga. I did learn more about the role of Texas in the Civil War than I knew before though.

Servants by Lucy Lethbridge

Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth-Century to Modern Times by Lucy Lethbridge

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Audio nonfiction 12 hours and 43 minutes

For centuries the way of life that is imagined as so typically upper class English was made possible entirely by vast staffs of servants.  This book looks at the roles of the various servants throughout history and at the changes in society that led to the loss of servants in English life. 

For most of history the poor people near a large country estate didn’t have much hope for a better life than getting in at the big house.  At least there you’d eat better than they did at home.  The social mores of the servants of the great houses were as complex as the social structures of the people they served.  The butlers and lady’s maids certainly didn’t mix with the scullery maid.

Things started to change around World War I.  Many new jobs opened in the military factories that offered more freedom.  Women could get these higher paying jobs that didn’t require them to be deferential to a lady of the house.  They also didn’t live in a house they worked in so weren’t required to obey all the rules of the house.  Once women started to have this freedom there was no going back.

Changes in the English tax code around this time also made it harder for families to keep the large houses so many servants were let go.

In the decade between wars servants were at a premium.  The could dictate their terms and leave and find another job at will.  “The Servant Problem” was written about extensively.  People were getting uppity and not respecting their betters.  For aristocrats who had been brought up to never have to do any domestic work themselves, this was absolutely confounding.  They could not understand why people weren’t happy to be their servants.  Many attempts were made to convince English girls especially that domestic service was a noble career choice.  It didn’t work.

Because of the lack of biddable English servants, foreign workers were brought in.  Many German and Austrian Jews were allowed into England before World War II only if they agreed to be servants.  Because they had to have connections to get the visas, many of them were upper class themselves.  They were horrified at the living conditions of the British.  Most British upper class homes had shunned all labor saving devices because after all, you wouldn’t want the maid getting lazy, would you?  For Central Europeans used to modern conveniences, homes that refused central heating or running hot water or electrical appliances were a throwback to times they had never known.

At the same time homes for working class people were getting modern.  For a while it was not uncommon for servants to live in modern homes and go to work in fancy houses that didn’t have any of the modern conveniences that they had.

Traditional service today is mostly limited to the super rich and fine hotels but may be living on in companies that provide services such as custom meals.

Idiot America by Charles Pierce

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Nonfiction, audio

When did being an expert on a subject turn into a liability in public debate?  Why are Americans more likely to listen to a political pundit or a television show host than a person who has made it her life work to study the matter up for discussion?  How is this dumbing down of America and Americans affecting our public policies?

1. Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
2. Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.
3. Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.

Charles P. Pierce doesn’t like a culture that considers experts to be elitists and is more concerned about who you’d rather have a beer with than who has a firm grasp on the issues.   He states that America has always been a good place for people who see things a bit strangely but it has never been so easy to make a living at it.

“The United States is an easy country to love because you can take it on faith that at some point in every waking hour of the day there is among your fellow citizens a vast exultation of opinions that test the outer boundary of the crazoid….

…. Let us be clear.  This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy.”

 

He starts with a visit to the Creation Museum.  I’ve been there and wrote about my sadness over the whole thing here.  Pierce was there about two years before me and describes the entry to the museum that must have been changed before I got there or I’d have probably passed out.  There was a dinosaur with a saddle on it.

“It was an English saddle, hornless and battered.  Apparently this was a dinosaur that performed in dressage competitions and stakes races.  Any dinosaur accustomed to the rigors of ranch work and herding other dinosaurs along the dusty trail almost certainly would have worn a sturdy western saddle.  This, obviously, was very much a show dinosaur.”

That might just be my favorite book quote of all time.

The book moves on to discuss the impact on a small town that became the center of a debate about teaching creationism.

He discusses the prolonged death of Terry Schiavo, which was debated all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.  She was even ordered to appear and testify before Congress because no one believed the people treating her when they said that she had been brain dead for years. Doctors are experts elitist, after all.

He discusses climate change deniers in the context of a small Alaskan town that is melting into the sea and then moves into the War on Terror.

A good companion to this book would be The Science of Fear.  It also discusses why we believe outrageous things if they “feel true” enough.

To sum up Idiot America we can quote Pastor Ray Mummert defending the Dover, PA school board’s attempt to get “intelligent design” taught in high school biology classes –

“We’ve been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture.“