At the risk of being chucked among the long suffering bibliobiuli of this world, I’d like to say that I think that non-stop reading is fun, and the next best thing to reading a good book is to share that book with others; and recommending or panning a book for the good people who read this board is, for me, the third best thing.
So, like it or not (after all it isn't like I'm wasting good ink and paper) here goes...

THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT; How the mind creates language.
Steven Pinker 1994

$ .93 used paperback from bookstore near the shores of Gitche Gumee, Michigan.

A classic of witty and wise words about words that is wonderfully written. . Four stars.

Excerpt
...The critic Mary McCarthy once said of her rival Lillian Hellman, “ Every word she writes is a lie including ‘and ‘ and ‘the’.”

This insult relies on the fact that a sentence is the smallest thing that can be either true or false; a single word can’t be either....

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GENES, PEOPLE, AND LANGUAGES (no subtitle, a translation of six lectures)
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Storza 2000

Free, on loan from public library, small book 198 pages.

Not so hot. Easy reading but the content is what you might expect from the translation of six spoken lecture made into a printed book. One lecture (chapter) however , includes a most exacting meaning for the term “race”. Three stars.

Excerpt
...Most important are some cultural changes that have spread out from Tibet and parts of India. Polygyny (the practice of keeping multiple wives) and polyandry (the practice of keeping multiple husbands) became popular practices which still exist. These two forms of polygamy are sometimes found in the same village. There are even simultaneous marriages between multiple men and multiple women. The wives and husbands in these multiple marriages are usually siblings, which probably explains these arrangements, since they avoid dividing inheritances and agricultural lands between siblings....

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DO ANIMALS THINK? ( the picture on the cover is the subtitle)
Clive D.L. Wynne 2004

Free, on loan from public library. Small book, 244 pages.
Lucky you if you find time to read this book . Clive Wynne brings an element of harsh truth to the science of animal behavior. No longer will we send our fifty bucks to Hawaii so that Koko can learn a few more words of monkey talk. Instead we will all afterwards spend our fifty bucks helping the magnificent mountain gorillas of Africa from being eaten by the hungry natives. Four stars.

Excerpt (paraphrased)

Remember the experiments conducted a few years back where the experimenter would dab a spot of red paint on a variety of animals and then sit them before mirrors to see if they would try to rub the paint off? The test was thought to determine which animals had a sense of self. i.e. an awareness that they existed as an entity separate from the external world.

The results were surprising. Only the higher apes exhibited a clear sense of self-awareness and some of them seemed not so sure. This made a friend of Clive Wynne mad.

Marc Bekoff (the friend) demonstrated that his pet dog Jethro has a sense of self-awareness too. Bekoff went around picking up yellow snow that Jethro and other dogs had urinated on and moved the clumps of yellow snow to spots further up the path where Jethro the dog would come across them.

The results were unequivocal . Jethro spent much less time sniffing, and was less likely to re-urinate on his own urinated snow than on the urinated snow of other dogs, ergo, Jethro proved self awareness based on urine --sorta like...
I pee; therefore I am.
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