Paula Uruburu | American Eve | Riverhead
The subtitle here is Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, The Birth of the "It" Girl, and the Crime of the Century. Nesbit's central role in the 1906 murder of internationally famous architect Stanford White has been dramatized by Hollywood in the 1955 film The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing and reimagined as fiction by E.L. Doctorow in Ragtime. Nesbit herself published two (sometimes inconsistent) memoirs. But never has this awful tale been better researched or described than in Hofstra University English professor Paula Uruburu's American Eve. Uruburu builds a psychological profile in which sexual naïvetû plus parental abandonment aggravated by an unearned notoriety based on looks alone adds up to certain doom.
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Words, words, words, The worst word, You say what?!, More 
- Words, words, words
Who would do such a thing?
- The worst word
Then it happens: you look up at the TV screen and see Bono, the lead singer of U2, step up to the podium to accept a statuette for recording the Best Alternative Music album. "We shall continue to abuse our position," he says, "and fuck up the mainstream."
- You say what?!
When Professor Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof created the language called Esperanto in late-19th-century Poland, he envisioned a world unified under a lingua franca.
- Òai? Ouais!
The many tongues of Occitania
- Plain talk
Jesse Sheidlower, an editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary , an expert in slang, and the author of The F-Word , can't stop talking about fuck.
- Say what?
Good news for perplexed suburbanites: a new site called UnderstandRap.com lets experienced rap interpreters explain difficult urban slang to hip-hop neophytes.
- Rakim: Return of the King
As long as the Microsoft linguists who're responsible for updating Word are adding "Barack" and "Obama" to the spell-check dictionary, they should throw in "Rakim."
- A guzzler’s glossary
“Alcoholic” and “articulate” rarely appear in the same slurred sentence, but it’s high time they did.
- French tickler
"The French language is perfect for talking about sex," muses hirsute Parisian singer and electronic-musician Sébastien Tellier.
- Men from Mars(eille)
“Un jour ou l’autre, parlera l’Europe marseillais” — “Sooner or later, Europe will speak Marseille.”
- The borscht I kissed once...
When I was working at the Harraseeket Inn in Freeport, two housekeepers who didn't speak English but giggled a lot brought in a pot of their family's borscht for the employee meal. In the dark basement hall where the employees ate, I tasted serious family-secret-cooking.
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Books
, Culture and Lifestyle, Language and Linguistics, Ammon Shea, More
, Culture and Lifestyle, Language and Linguistics, Ammon Shea, Ammon Shea, AMERICAN EVE, Roberto Bolano, Marilynne Robinson, Marilynne Robinson, Roberto Bolaño, 2666, Less
