Neil V. Smith: Language, Bananas and Bonobos: Linguistic Problems, Puzzles and Polemics

Brief Introduction:
Language pervades every aspect of life.  It is essential to everyone everywhere- from politicians to poets, philosophers to pharmacists- yet linguistics is often forbidding.  This collection of short, accessible essays changes that.  Language, Bananas and Bonobos presents a series of engaging reflections on concerns such as our knowledge and use of language, political correctness, and the linguistic abilities of chimpanzees.

William Safire: The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

Brief Introduction:
Wit and wisdom from the popular “On Language” column in the The New York Times Magazine.  From nestpionage to e-fraud and frankenfood, Safire’s latest anthology has it all.  With precision and pleasure, Safire puts those who take linguistic missteps- politicians and newscasters among his favorites- back in line.

Christopher J. Moore
In Other Words:  A Language Lover’s Guide to the Most Intriguing Words Around the World

Brief Introduction:
Take a trip around the world of words and unlock the meaning of some of the most insightful, intriguing, and satisfying expressions on the planet, for which there are no English equivalents.  Moore defines these so-called “untranslatables,” opening a window into the culture of each language, explaining in words and phrases that in literal terms may boggle the mind.

Nicholas Ostler: Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

Brief Introduction:
The story of the world in the last five thousand years is above all the story of its languages. Some shared language is what binds any community together and makes possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it. How words manage to accomplish a complete U-turn in their meaning over a relatively short time right up to the Arabic of the present day; the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions; the charmed progress of Sanskrit from north India to Java and Japan; the engaging self-regard of Greek; the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe; and the global spread of English.  As this book splendidly and authoritatively reveals, the language history of the world shows eloquently the real character of peoples; like the word and, for all the recent tehnical mastery of English, nothing guarantees our language's long-term preeminence. The language future, like the language past, will be full of surprises.

Guy Deutsher: The Unfolding of Language:  An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

Brief Introduction:
How do languages evolve? Why does language always change – and does it decline or does it progress? What accounts for its extraordinary complexity?  In The Unfolding of Language, Guy Deutscher responds to the big questions with big answers, along the way solving such mysteries as:  why we have feet and not foots, how the French came to say “on the day on the day of this day” to mean today, and why German maidens are neuter but German turnips are female, among others.

Harlan Lane: The Wild Boy of Aveyron

Brief Introduction:
The dramatic account of a wild boy of nature and a young French doctor who shaped the modern education of retarded, deaf, and preschool children.

Simon Winchester
The Professor and the Madman : A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

Brief Introduction:
The Professor and the Madman is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary- and literary history.  The compilation of the OED, begun in 1857, was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken.  As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand.  When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light:  Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.

Harlan Lane : When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf

Brief Introduction:
When the Mind Hears, the first comprehensive history of the deaf, is also a powerful and compassionate study of the anatomy of prejudice and the motives and means of oppression.  It is a narrative, told largely from the vantage point of Laurent Clerc, the deaf Frenchman who was the intellectual leader of the deaf community in France and later in America.  Ultimately, the story of the deaf is a tragic one, as educators throughout history have sought to abolish sign language from the education of the deaf.  This piece conveys the anger and frustration of all those who, deprived of their language, are deprived of their rightful heritage.

Andrew Hodges; foreword by Douglas Hofstadter: Alan Turing: The Enigma
(Hodges has a Turing website that is pretty good at: www.turing.org.uk/turing)

Brief Introduction:
Alan Turing (1912-54) was a British mathematician who made history. His breaking of the German U-boat Enigma cipher in World War II ensured Allied-American control of the Atlantic. But Turing's true goal was the scientific understanding of the mind, brought out in the drama and wit of the famous "Turing test" for machine intelligence and in his prophecy for the twenty-first century.  In 1952 he revealed his homosexuality and was forced to participate in a humiliating treatment program, and was ever after regarded as a security risk. His suicide in 1954 remains one of the many enigmas in an astonishing life story.

Paul Bloom: Descartes' Baby: How Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human

Brief Introduction:

All humans see the world in two fundamentally different ways: Even babies have a rich understanding of both the physical and social worlds. They expect objects to obey principles of physics, and they're startled when things disappear or defy gravity. Yet they can also read emotions and respond with anger, sympathy, and joy. In Descartes' Baby, Bloom draws on a wealth of scientific discoveries to show how these two ways of knowing give rise to such uniquely human traits as humor, disgust, religion, art, and morality. The myriad ways that our dualist perspectives, born in infancy, undergo development throughout our lives and profoundly influence our thoughts, feelings, and actions is the subject of this richly rewarding book.

Daniel C. Dennett : Brainstorms:  Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology

Brief Introduction:
Dennett reflects on the early achievements of artificial intelligence to develop his ideas on consciousness. 

Douglas Hofstadter: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Brief Introduction:
Gödel, Escher, Bach, a Pulitzer prize-winning treatise on genius, explores the workings of brilliant people's brains with the help of historical examples and brainteaser puzzles. Not for the dim or the lazy, this book shows you, more clearly than most any other, what it means to see symbols and patterns where others see only the universe. Touching on math, computers, literature, music, and artificial intelligence, Gödel, Escher, Bach is a challenging and potentially life-changing piece of writing.