Helpful votes received on reviews:
100% (5 of 5)
Location: Ithaca, NY, United States
Birthday: Feb 10 (Saved Remind mePlease RetryPlease Retry)
In My Own Words:
My name is Diana Nier and I live in Ithaca, NY. My interests include reading, writing, inadvertent literary analysis, long walks, rescuing plants, talking with friends, playing the oboe, and singing. Sadly, I don't do much with music these days. I have brown hair, brown eyes, a growing collection of house plants, and a somewhat erratic sense of humor. You may picture me laughing; it seems frie… Read moreMy name is Diana Nier and I live in Ithaca, NY. My interests include reading, writing, inadvertent literary analysis, long walks, rescuing plants, talking with friends, playing the oboe, and singing. Sadly, I don't do much with music these days.
I have brown hair, brown eyes, a growing collection of house plants, and a somewhat erratic sense of humor. You may picture me laughing; it seems friendly. :-)
I'm addicted to any and all books, with preferences for speculative fiction and the social sciences: history, sociology, psychology, etc. However, I don't review everything I read, for three reasons. 1) I'm lazy. 2) Other people have already said everything I have to say. 3) The book made so little impression on me, for good or ill, that I have nothing to say about it.
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Reviews
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
"Alpha Beta" is the story of a revolutionary idea -- that instead of using symbols to represent words, or even to represent syllables, each symbol could represent a single sound, and thereby reproduce a language in only two or three dozen symbols, rather than hundreds or thousands. John Man tracks the development of alphabets from the ancient Middle East and their spread across the world. Man's basic theory is that the alphabet is a revolutionary idea. It is not, he says, necessarily a BETTER way to record information than syllabic/pictographic scripts, but it is certainly a different way, and one that requires a fair degree of abstraction. He further posits that writing… Read more
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Janice VanCleave's "Constellations For Every Kid" is one of the books I used to teach an astronomy unit to the boys I help homeschool. It is quite limited in its scope -- containing only the northern constellations and no complete star maps -- but is very useful for basic constellation identification. I used it mostly as a source of seasonal star maps for the boys to copy. It also helpfully identifies some key stars in various constellations, and provides tips for finding various constellations once the positions of others are known. However, this is about all the book is good for. The explanations of various phenomena are extremely limited, VanCleave provides none of the legends… Read more
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Reading Patricia McKillip is akin to lucid dreaming; I am aware that the world is not real and is not functioning according to everyday logic, but people and events form oddly beautiful and meaningful patterns. I slow down, reading individual words instead of compressing them into sentences and paragraphs; McKillip's language is half the pleasure of her books. The other thing I love about McKillip is how little her books resemble cookie-cutter "fantasy" dreck. While her books are all reminiscent of each other, they are all individual. And they are not like anything else I've read. "Ombria in Shadow" is no exception. Ombria is an ancient city; its past lies buried underground, layers… Read more
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