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Manny Rayner's book reviews
I love reviewing books - have been doing it at Goodreads, but considering moving here.
Currently reading
The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution
R in Action
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture
Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics)
Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology
The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition
Every small Swedish child is read this classic picture book in verse, about the family of little tomtar (roughly, pixies or leprechauns) who live under the old pine tree. It's so sexist that a line from one of the early verses is often quoted by Swedish people as shorthand for gender stereotyping:
- "Father is strong and brave, and mother is sweet and kind". You shudder.Och far är stark och modig, och mor är blid och rar
And yet the book is utterly charming, and Swedish kids grow up to be the least sexist people in the world. I wish I could explain the paradox. The issue of non-PC language in children's books isn't as simple as is sometimes claimed.
