Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
By Lynne Truss (Gotham, $17.50)
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The shelves of almost every London bookstore were chock-full of this how-to grammar book, a No. 1 best seller in England, when I was visiting the U.K. this past January. I fantasized about seeing it in the same position on The New York Times best-seller list, perhaps knocking off the army of low-carb diet guides. How could a book about punctuation be so popular? This could mean three things: The book- buying population in England is full of spods (British for dorks); British people are more honest about admitting ignorance in the grammar department; or Lynne Truss actually makes it entertaining to read about commas and semicolons.
Probably all three are true. But for myself, being both a spod and grammar aficionado, I was also enthralled by the author's fascinating historical account of punctuation itself. Indeed, her enthusiasm is so ebullient that when Truss describes the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius the Elder, the man who invented italics and first printed the semicolon, she exclaims in a Bridget Jones tone, "I will happily admit I hadn't heard of him until a year ago, but am now absolutely kicking myself that I never volunteered to have his babies."
Did anyone observe the missing apostrophe from the Sandra Bullock–Hugh Grant movie Two Weeks Notice? Truss did, along with the rest of her fellow "sticklers" who feel the sharp sting of a bee when apostrophes are blatantly abused. With examples like Two Weeks, Truss explains the rules of grammar with everyday instances, breaking down each rule for even the most grammar-phobic among us.
Had an index been compiled for this slim, useful book, I would've kept it on the shelf of invaluables next to my Strunk & White, Chicago Manual of Style, and William Zinsser. SAMANTHA STOREY
Lynne Truss will appear at University Book Store, 7 p.m. Mon., April 26.
The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It
By Neal Bascomb (Houghton Mifflin, $24)
It's all about the circular sweep of the second hand in the stopwatch—not today's wrist-worn digital kind, but the heavy, satisfying mechanical models seen dangling around the necks of fat-bellied track coaches in yellowed old newspaper clippings. The fact that it takes four revolutions of a 440-yard track to cover a mile and four revolutions of a stopwatch to clock four minutes is why the date May 6, 1954, is historic. The happy homology of it, the perfect echo of each 60-second lap around the cinders within the smaller sphere of the stopwatch, is why Roger Bannister is remembered on the 50th anniversary of his feat—becoming the first man to break the four-minute barrier—and why author Neal Bascomb has trotted out a new book on the subject.
Actually, it's an old subject, and an old story already told several times before. It's also been told better (notably by physician Bannister himself in his 1955 The Four-Minute Mile, reissued in paper 10 years ago), without the unwieldy three-man, three-story structure Bascomb invents as a hokey narrative device—presumably to make it more American-friendly and movie-friendly. Indeed, the movie rights to Perfect have already been sold to the producers of Seabiscuit. That's not a good sign, since they took a good book and made it into a burnished, boring, mediocre Oscar nominee. Here, although three handsome young actors will be able to star instead of a nontalking horse, the entire tripartite structure leads to a climax in which one of the athletes—the American, no less—isn't even competing.
Brit Bannister and Aussie John Landy actually met and competed against each other, most famously at the August 1954 Commonwealth Games in Vancouver, B.C., when both bested the four-minute standard again. But Kansan Wes Santee, though he had a good chance to crack four first, is pretty much a historical footnote to Bannister's story—one that Bascomb unwisely inflates for the domestic market.
The current record, held by Moroccan Hicham El Guerrouj, is 3:43.13, not a number with much poetry to it; a shorter 1,500-meter distance is now the world standard on 400-meter tracks—all that beautiful symmetry is lost. Sub-four-minute miles are no longer rare, although good writing on distance running still is. Bascomb falls short of the standard of, say, Sports Illustrated's Kenny Moore, but the wildly different personalities and circumstances do come through in the three runners he profiles here. His book is well researched and well told enough to get optioned. To play Bannister, however, Hugh Grant will have to lose some weight. BRIAN MILLER
Neal Bascomb will appear at Seattle Running Co. (919 E. Pine St., 206-634-3400), 7 p.m. Tues., April 27.
Sun After Dark: Flights Into the Foreign
By Pico Iyer (Knopf, $22.95)
"The excitement of travel," writes Pico Iyer in this collection of essays on far-flung destinations, "is that you're in a place where nothing makes more sense than a dream." And there's nothing like traveling alone to make you doubt your sanity: I once awoke in a guest house in Laos in a fit of paranoia, convinced everyone was trying to prevent me from attending a festival the next day. Travel does weird stuff to you, and that's its power.
