Fans pick 100 books like The Reign of Truth and Faith

This seventeenth-century offering is where the famous Molyneux Man first appears in the form of a question: If a man born blind and capable of distinguishing a cube from a sphere by touch, was suddenly made to see, would he be able to distinguish the two objects by sight alone? The answer was a resounding “no!” Just as we must learn to read, we must learn to see, gradually building up connections between our sense of touch and our sense of sight. This was a revelation to me when I encountered it as a person going blind and learning to not-see. If humans are not exactly born blank slates, we are certainly unfinished ones, whose environments and education supply us with knowledge and brain power to perceive the world.

This book is about “The Danish universe of meaning,” or, the view of the world as it is has been captured by Danish words and meanings. The work includes deep semantic analysis of cultural constructs such as hygge, roughly, ‘pleasant togetherness’ and tryghed, roughly, ‘sense of security, peace of mind,’ as well as cognitive verbs, emotion adjectives, personhood constructs, and rhetorical keywords. But Levisen’s aim is not only to study Danish—at heart, the book is about cultural semantics at large. The aim is to use Danish as a case study and to provide a new model for comparative research into the diversity and unity of meaning in European languages. To my mind, this book wonderfully succeeds in achieving this aim.

This is a pioneering book which raises some fundamental questions about nouns and the concepts that they embody—not abstract nouns, but concrete nouns like ‘brother’, ‘angel’, ‘bee’, ‘foot,’ and ‘pond’? How can we study and compare such concepts across languages in a truly meaningful way that does not privilege the categories of one language over those in other languages? This collective volume seeks to provide answers to these questions and show how in-depth meaning analysis, anchored in a cross-linguistic and cross-domain perspective, can lead to unexpected insights into the common and particular ways in which speakers of different languages conceptualise, categorise and order the world around them. Many languages are included in the volume, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Hebrew, and the Papuan language Koromu.

Minimal languages are based on words which are clear, accessible and easy-to-translate. This book presents a diverse and fascinating range of studies, illustrating this new approach to meaning and communication. The authors show, how they are putting minimal languages into service; for example, to help language learners understand the invisible culture behind French or Korean ways of speaking; to improve “easy language” materials for people with linguistic and cognitive troubles; to inform better health communication about cancer or COVID-19. One of my favourite chapters shows how a pediatric tool for assessing mother-infant emotional connection was adapted into simply-worded versions in English, Finnish, Chinese, and four other languages.

This clever and funny book explains that there are specific techniques that make good writing sound good, or a pithy phrase stick in the mind, and tells you the long and difficult Greek (or slightly easier Latin) names for all these rules you kind of knew without actually knowing.

I can hardly retain any of the Greek labels, but I do remember the fun little examples, like why Oscar Wilde’s epigrams are so striking (antithesis) and how Shakespeare totally lifted part of Julius Caesar from a historian, but polished it up (alliteration). And whenever you hear a memorable three-part phrase, it was probably longer but everyone forgot the other bits (tricolon). 

This is not one for fans of utilitarian writing, but as Forsyth says, “To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility.”

I was fascinated by Foster’s detective work in literary history–searching for the actual authors of poems, political novels, and proclamations, the authors of which had always been considered “anonymous.” Using a variety of ingenious methods, Foster tracks down the persons behind mysterious documents ranging from the Unabomber’s threats to “The Night Before Christmas.”

I loved Foster’s wry and sometimes caustic sense of humor, especially when he is skewering the “experts” whom he proves to be wrong. This book is, quite simply, great fun for the intellectually curious.

If I had to name one book that is almost the exact opposite of Toury’s, it is this one. Venuti’s book is the rare kind of scholarly book one reads over one or two sittings. It is angry, provocative, polemical, and just pure fun.

For Venuti, there is no separating fact from value, and whether it plans to or not, translation (and scholarship on translation) affects change in both text and world—often for the worst. If Toury’s book emulated scientific discourse, Venuti’s reads like a crossover between a political manifesto and a crime novel. Translation is a violent business, shrouded in suspicion and hidden agendas, that need to be exposed through symptomatic readings and critical analyses.

The book ends with a passionate call to action enlisting translators—despite the risks entailed therein—to develop new methodologies that will, as Venuti writes: “make a difference, not only at home [. . .] but… show more.

If I had to choose just one book on language that all American college students should read, it would be this one.

The author wrote early versions of this book in 1939 and 1941, when World War II was breaking out, and the world came to understand the poisonous nature of Nazi propaganda. The study of semantics turns out to be more than an abstract consideration of language. The responsible use of language is the antidote to disinformation, a lesson we can carry into our own times.

Why neutral reports are crucial to democracy and self-government; how connotations of words reveal bias; the power of climbing up and down the ladder of abstraction so readers can see and understand; all these are introduced to the reader in this groundbreaking work.

My family is trying to slowly work our way through visiting all 63 US National Parks. So far, my 2.5-year-old has been to 6!

Because we love the National Parks so much, my husband and I love reading this book to our son. It covers 26 different National Parks, as well as many of their features and native animals, in a fun A to Z format. 

This is a must for any aspiring social scientist. Ironically entitled, the book offers a brilliant account of how many researchers in the social sciences resort to esoteric jargon and abstruse arguments to promote themselves in their academic micro-fiefdoms, defend their areas of expertise from outsiders but also to obfuscate and conceal their own ignorance. The book, however, can also be read on how to write well and get published in the social sciences.