Wordstruck: A Memoir - Hardcover

MacNeil, Robert

3.78

160 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670818712 ISBN 13: 9780670818716

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1989

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A Nova Scotia boyhood is recaptured through remembrances of early encounters with the written word and love of the language and the quiet but unforgettable special moments of youth

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Review:

People become writers, in large part, because they are in love with language. Wordstruck is the story of one such writer's unabashed affair with words, from his Halifax childhood awash with intriguing accents to life as a traveling journalist who "delighted in finding pockets of distinctive English, as a botanist is thrilled to discover a new variety of plant." Each aspect of Robert MacNeil's youthful existence prompted yet another linguistic thrill. Childhood churchgoing "did not provide me with any spiritual awakening ... but it anointed me with language." His mother's passion for the natural world and his father's life as a ship's skipper gave him two more complete vocabularies. And "If you define yourself by the language you acquire as you enter different spheres," MacNeil writes, the absurd language of "cricket was another piece of my self-definition."

MacNeil is best known as a novelist, coauthor of The Story of English, and onetime executive editor of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. In Wordstruck he imparts a passion for Shakespeare (in particular, Hamlet), Dylan Thomas, and T. S. Eliot, whose ear for the English language, he says, was "the equivalent of perfect pitch--for the harmonic range of our tongue, its rhythms, and all its voices." Wordstruck is a charming memoir from a man "crazy about the sound of words, the look of words, the taste of words, the feeling for words on the tongue and in the mind."

From Publishers Weekly:

PBS-TV Newshour presenter MacNeil coauthored the book and TV series The Story of English. Here he tells how, as a child, he began a lifelong fascination with languagethe crisp sea-words of Treasure Island , sonorous Bible phrases, Chaucer's pithiness, Shakespeare's magical syntax and, later, "flashes of recognition" from T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas, among others. Growing up during World War II in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where his naval father was based, MacNeil drank in the seacoast atmosphere but more avidly feasted on books. Later, his performances in school plays led to jobs in radio and a full-time broadcasting career, much of it in England, where he took a renewed interest in idioms and dialects. Not quite chronological, the author's account roves fondly back and forth between family memories and his love of words and language. 60,000 first printing; $50,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild alternate; author tour.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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