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Newest Reference Reviews (view source)

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[[Category:New Reviews|Reference]]

[[Category:Reference|*]] __NOTOC__

{{newreview

|author= Marianne Taylor

|title= Owls: A Guide to Every Species

|rating= 5

|genre= Reference

|summary=I feel like I am being watched. A huge pair of piercing orange eyes are staring right at me, locking me into their gaze. In contrast with the hardness of the deep-amber eyes, soft grey feathers fan out into the surrounding area, intricate, detailed and beautiful. An enigma; harsh and gentle at the same time, the owl is beckoning the reader to turn the pages and take a closer look inside...

|amazonuk=<amazonuk>178240404X</amazonuk>

}}

{{newreview

|author=John Van der Kiste

|summary=From the sixteenth-century Baltic to the American Revolution, from colonial India to the skyscrapers of modern-day Shanghai, Shakespeare's plays appear at the most fascinating of times in the most unexpected of places. But what is it about Shakespeare – a man who never once left England, which has made him an icon across the globe? Travelling across four continents, six countries and 400 years, ''Worlds Elsewhere'' attempts to understand Shakespeare in his role as an international phenomenon.

|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099578956</amazonuk>

}}

~~{{newreview~~

~~|author=Graeme Donald~~

~~|title=Words of a Feather~~

~~|rating=4~~

~~|genre=Reference~~

|summary= Words of a Feather. The title alone suggests an engaging read about language, and the book certainly delivers. It pairs seemingly unrelated words, digs up their etymological roots and reveals their common ancestry. The English language, of course, provides rich pickings indeed for a book of this type and it is fascinating to see the hidden meaning behind common and not-so-common words. Some connections are fairly obvious once you read them. For example, the link between ''grotto'' and ''grotesque'' is easy to grasp: the word ''grotesque'' derives from unpleasant figures depicted in murals in Ancient Roman ''grottoes''. Other connections are just extraordinary, like the so-crazy-you-couldn't-make-it-up connection between ''furnace'' and ''fornicate''. These two words date back to Ancient Rome when prostitutes took over the city's abandoned baking domes. And some connections are more than a little tenuous, seemingly just a collection of words banded together, as is the case with the ''insult'' and ''salmon'' pairing. One of my personal favourites: the Italian word ''schiavo'' for ''slave'' was used to summon or dismiss a slave; this word became corrupted to ''ciao'', a word the more well-heeled among us use instead of ''goodbye''.

~~|amazonuk=<amazonuk>178418814X</amazonuk>~~

}}

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