Christine Kenneally

How do cannibals insult one another?

It's not like pork. That misunderstanding about the taste of human flesh is attributable to one of those linguistic mix-ups between explorers and locals: Apparently Pacific Islanders called human meat "long pig" because wild pig was the only other large animal whose meat they ate. According to Carole Travis-Henikoff's "Dinner With a Cannibal: The Complete History of Mankind's Oldest Taboo" (Santa Monica Press, 333 pages, $24.95), humans taste more like beef, only better. At least for some folks, she writes, the meat of people is the best they've ever had... New York Sun.

Is it end of days for Roget's?

When you are searching for a word that is more precise than another though similar in meaning, you don't browse Piozzi's. Yet British Synonymy, the first English book of synonyms, was written by Hester Lynch Piozzi. Nor do you grab your Girard's. Published 76 years before Piozzi, the 1718 book of French words appears to be the first collection of synonyms in any language. What you reach for is your Roget's. Originally published in 1852, having been compiled over the course of more than four decades by the eponymous but strangely anonymous Peter Mark Roget, the thesaurus we know and love was not the first of its kind... Slate.

Also at Slate, a brief look at overwhelming anxiety.

Los Angeles Times Books Prize Nomination

The First Word got a nod in the LA Times Book Prize nominations! Winners will be announced in April.

Wonderful winter reading

Check out Slate's winter picks. I chose fiction for a change.

Best of 2007

I've been distracted with journalism and will inaugurate the first post of 2008 with a books round-up of 2007. Possibly this is the last "best of" list for '07 or, at least, the most belated. 

Here are my picks for Slate.

In addition to those excellent volumes, it's been a productive year for my friends. Deborah Siegal published Sisterhood Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild. Harriet Washington brought forth the NBCC-nominated  Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. The paperback of The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire by Tom Zoellner came out in June. Alissa Quart's Hothouse Kids: How the Pressure to Succeed Threatens Childhood was released in paperback one month later. Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World came out in paperback in October.

The just-released, and I believe very bestselling, The Sweet Far Thing was written by the ingenious Libba Bray.

Looking ahead, the paperback of Josh Prager's The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World will be published on March 11 and Gary Bass's Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention is coming out in hardback on August 19. Happy reading!

The stuff of Steven Pinker's thought

With his characteristic flair ("verbivores," "whimperatives," "malefactive verbs," "momentaneous events"), Pinker picks language apart to reveal the conceptual scaffolds and preoccupations that underlie it, including pervasive beliefs about the workings of time, space, and motion, as well as the human body. Slate.

The First Word

The First Word is published today! It should be available on shelves and online throughout North America.

Australians can buy it online from Amazon.com, and also I believe from local online retailers like Angus & Robertson. UK residents can get it from Amazon.co.uk, and I've spied it at many other European online bookstores, such as the French Amazon. I believe The First Word is also to be found at the Japanese Amazon, if you are so located.