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The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams

Work on the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, and the enormous, crowd-sourced task finally ended with the dictionary’s publication in ten volumes in 1928. Pip Williams’s novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words, shows us the people (largely fictionalized) and the process of this amazing scholarly and technical achievement.

Via the very intimate first-person narrative of Esme, who basically grew up in the Scriptorium, Williams explores childhood, friendship, motherhood, the suffragist movement, sex, sexism, the brutality of World War I, and the shifting English class structure. Most of all, she explores the complexity of words. What they mean. How they make us feel. How we use them to include and exclude. How they bestow and deny power. How there are men’s words and women’s words. How not all words are welcome in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Esme is four years old when we meet her. She has an intuitive and visceral relationship with words even as a young child. As she tells us in the prologue, “Before the lost word, there was another.”As she sits on her dad’s lap in the Scriptorium on a snowy morning and helps him open envelopes into which readers have tucked words and citations of their use in publications, the word lily arrives. Because Lily is the name of Esme’s dead mother, her dad—in surprise and pain—throws the small piece of paper in the fire. Esme rushes to save it. She fails; and her scarred hands are lifelong physical reminders that words aren’t simple, straightforward things. They are profoundly powerful and complex. And they affect people differently.

In her intimate engaging voice, Esme invites us into her life as a motherless child and eventually a childless mother. We see her in her marriage to Gareth, who loves and understands her so well he has her collection of women’s words—with attribution cheekily in the spirit of the OED—typeset and beautifully bound as an engagement gift.

Motherhood is a huge theme in the story. It begins with Esme rescuing the word that is her mother from the fire and ends with her daughter, Megan, sixty-one years after publication of the first edition of the OED, speaking at a celebration of the recent second edition. She smooths an old piece of paper with the word bondmaid written on it. “Bondmaid. For a while this beautiful, troubling word belonged to my mother.” It was the word that launched a little girl into her passion for language, as she sat under the sorting table, catching word crumbs, studying the feet and legs of scholarly men enclosing her space.

Esme grows up without a mother, but she is not un-mothered. There is Lizzie, in service in Dr. Murray’s household, not a lot older than Esme, but wise beyond her years. Lizzie lets Esme keep her “lost” words in a trunk under Lizzie’s bed. Lizzie is not literate, but she is profoundly expressive. She explains to Esme that her needlepoint may be the only sign left to say she ever existed. The needlepoint makes her feel permanent. The rest of the time, bondmaid that she is, she feels like a dandelion just before the wind blows. –an image so perfect it made me shiver.

There’s Edith Thompson, who helps Esme navigate life much as a mother would, caring for Esme during a secret pregnancy, and brokering a good and loving home for the baby. Unlike illiterate Lizzie, Ditte, as Esme calls her, is an author and contributor to the OED, who is honored by getting to watch the men dine sumptuously in celebration—finally—of the full publication of the dictionary. Ditte is the one who passes on the first word that Esme pilfered from the Scriptorium—bondmaid—to Esme’s daughter, Megan, along with the message that Esme had always felt herself a bondmaid to the Dictionary.

While I know it’s just a story and Esme is a made-up character, I gasped when I read the news from Ditte to Megan, that Esme had been accidentally killed in a lorry accident in 1928, just as I had a two-hanky cry earlier when Gareth did not come home from the war. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a wonderful read. I wanted to turn the pages quickly and find out how Esme’s life was unfolding and, paradoxically, I wanted to savor the story of that life slowly, not to move too quickly from her innocent child’s voice, to her grown-up voice, to silence.

— Sharelle Moranville

Poverty by America, by Matthew Desmond

Matthew Desmond puts the central question of his book this way:

“This is who we are: the richest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy. If America’s poor founded a country, that country would have a bigger population than Australia or Venezuela. Almost one in nine Americans – including one in eight children – live in poverty…. Books about poverty tend to be books about the poor. It’s been this way for more than a hundred years…. Bearing witness, these kinds of books help us understand the nature of poverty. They are vital. But they do not – and in fact cannot – answer the most fundamental question, which is: Why? Why all this American poverty?”

That IS the question. And this book is important because Desmond takes great pains to examine all of the supposed root causes of poverty in this land of plenty. One by one he refutes the arguments (and mostly pejorative arguments) about why people in this country are poor. And he comes to the conclusion that the reason why we have poverty in this country is that we like it that way. Too many of us profit from the penury of our neighbors.

Desmond outlines how we, the not-poor in this country, undercut workers, how we force the poor to pay more, how we rely on welfare, how we buy opportunity. He ends with three powerful chapters exhorting us to invest in ending poverty by empowering the poor and tearing down the walls that separate us.

The book is exhaustively researched and documented. Fully one-third of the pages in the book are devoted to citations of studies, quotes and powerful examples that shore up his statistics. And Desmond is angry. He wants us to be ashamed of ourselves. He wants us to become poverty abolitionists.

“There are a good many challenges facing this big, wide country, but near the top of the list must be concerns about basic needs. We must ask ourselves – and then ask our community organizations, our employers, our places of worship, our schools, our political parties, our courts, our towns, our families: What are we doing to divest from poverty? Every person, every company, every institution that has a role in perpetuating poverty also has a role in ameliorating it. The end of poverty is something to stand for, to march for, to sacrifice for. Because poverty is the dream killer, the capability destroyer, the great waster of human potential. It is a misery and a national disgrace, one that belies any claim to our greatness. The citizens of the richest nation in the world can and should finally put an end to it. We don’t need to outsmart this problem. We need to outhate it.”

Yes, this is an important book. A really important book. I wish everyone would read it and begin to think, “What can I do today to be a poverty abolitionist?”

— Jeanie Smith

Skinny Dip, by Carl Hiassen

In this lighthearted romp through the Florida Everglades, author Carl Hiaasen creates an intricate and inventive plot replete with flying bears, errant skydivers, bed-ridden pythons, endangered wetlands, and imperiled Pomeranians.

We meet a murderous and supremely moronic “scientist”; his multimillionaire, champion swimmer wife; one bad guy who finds redemption, except for that one murder; another bad guy who is killed by a highway memorial cross; the buff middle-aged former cop who has retired to his own island and ends up getting the girl (an author can fantasize); a current cop who channels his inner Columbo; and an Australian sheep farmer who runs away with the hairdresser who apparently is smarter than she was first written.

Hiaasen is a former investigative journalist who might have faced so much governmental corruption and environmental havoc he needed to take a break from serious into silly. He obviously had fun here—the book can be laugh-out-loud funny and outrageously witty. Plus, it has its educational moments about how the Everglades have been destroyed and how money for their revival has been squandered by shady local bureaucrats. It’s a beach read, and perhaps those of us who weren’t total fans of the book were just lacking a beach.

— Pat Prijatel