Download or read book Bryson s Dictionary for Writers and Editors written by Bill Bryson and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2011-06-22 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the world’s most beloved and bestselling authors, a terrifically useful and readable guide to the problems of the English language most commonly encountered by editors and writers. What is the singular form of graffiti? From what mythological figure is the word “tantalize” derived? One of the English language’s most skilled writers guides us all toward precise, mistake-free usage. Covering spelling, capitalization, plurals, hyphens, abbreviations, and foreign names and phrases, Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors will be an indispensable companion for all who care enough about our language not to maul, misuse, or contort it. As Bill Bryson notes, “English is a dazzlingly idiosyncratic tongue, full of quirks and irregularities that often seem willfully at odds with logic and common sense.” This dictionary is an essential guide to the wonderfully disordered thing that is the English language.
Download or read book Bryson s Dictionary of Troublesome Words written by Bill Bryson and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the English language's most skilled and beloved writers guides us all towards precise, mistake-free usage. In the middle 1980s Bill Bryson was a copy editor for the London Times with the brash idea that he could fill a hole in the British book market for a concise, accessible, handy guide to proper usage. A complete unknown, he nonetheless sold Penguin Books on the idea, and the result was The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words, which sold decently enough on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, fifteen years later, Bill Bryson has become, well, Bill Bryson -- and his terrifically useful little book has been revised, updated and Americanized to become Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words. Precise, prescriptive, sometimes (like its author) amusingly prickly, this book belongs on the desk of every person who cares enough about our language not to maul or misuse or distort it. Move over, Strunk and White.
Download or read book The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words written by Bill Bryson and published by Puffin. This book was released on 1987 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid written by Bill Bryson and published by Crown. This book was released on 2006-10-17 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the world's most beloved writers and New York Times bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods and The Body, a vivid, nostalgic, and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the 1950s. Bill Bryson was born in the middle of the American century—1951—in the middle of the United States—Des Moines, Iowa—in the middle of the largest generation in American history—the baby boomers. As one of the best and funniest writers alive, he is perfectly positioned to mine his memories of a totally all-American childhood for 24-carat memoir gold. Like millions of his generational peers, Bill Bryson grew up with a rich fantasy life as a superhero. In his case, he ran around his house and neighborhood with an old football jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a towel about his neck that served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in a single bound and vanquishing awful evildoers (and morons)—in his head—as "The Thunderbolt Kid." Using this persona as a springboard, Bill Bryson re-creates the life of his family and his native city in the 1950s in all its transcendent normality—a life at once completely familiar to us all and as far away and unreachable as another galaxy. It was, he reminds us, a happy time, when automobiles and televisions and appliances (not to mention nuclear weapons) grew larger and more numerous with each passing year, and DDT, cigarettes, and the fallout from atmospheric testing were considered harmless or even good for you. He brings us into the life of his loving but eccentric family, including affectionate portraits of his father, a gifted sportswriter for the local paper and dedicated practitioner of isometric exercises, and of his mother, whose job as the home furnishing editor for the same paper left her little time for practicing the domestic arts at home. The many readers of Bill Bryson’s earlier classic, A Walk in the Woods, will greet the reappearance in these pages of the immortal Stephen Katz, seen hijacking literally boxcar loads of beer. He is joined in the Bryson gallery of immortal characters by the demonically clever Willoughby brothers, who apply their scientific skills and can-do attitude to gleefully destructive ends. Warm and laugh-out-loud funny, and full of his inimitable, pitch-perfect observations, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is as wondrous a book as Bill Bryson has ever written. It will enchant anyone who has ever been young.
Download or read book A Walk in the Woods written by Bill Bryson and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: God only knows what possessed Bill Bryson, a reluctant adventurer if ever there was one, to undertake a gruelling hike along the world's longest continuous footpath—The Appalachian Trail. The 2,000-plus-mile trail winds through 14 states, stretching along the east coast of the United States, from Georgia to Maine. It snakes through some of the wildest and most spectacular landscapes in North America, as well as through some of its most poverty-stricken and primitive backwoods areas. With his offbeat sensibility, his eye for the absurd, and his laugh-out-loud sense of humour, Bryson recounts his confrontations with nature at its most uncompromising over his five-month journey. An instant classic, riotously funny, A Walk in the Woods will add a whole new audience to the legions of Bill Bryson fans.
Download or read book Made in America written by Bill Bryson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1996-03-01 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bill Bryson, who gave glorious voice to The Mother Tongue, now celebrates her magnificent offspring in the book that reveals once and for all how a dusty western hamlet with neither woods nor holly came to be known as Hollywood...and exactly why Mr. Yankee Doodle call his befeathered cap "Macaroni."
Download or read book Notes from a Small Island written by Bill Bryson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before New York Times bestselling author Bill Bryson wrote The Road to Little Dribbling, he took this delightfully irreverent jaunt around the unparalleled floating nation of Great Britain, which has produced zebra crossings, Shakespeare, Twiggie Winkie’s Farm, and places with names like Farleigh Wallop and Titsey.
Download or read book The Mother Tongue written by Bill Bryson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Vastly informative and vastly entertaining…A scholarly and fascinating book.” —Los Angeles Times With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language. From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can’t), to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed into one of the world’s largest growth industries.
Download or read book How to Not Write Bad written by Ben Yagoda and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-02-05 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ben Yagoda's How to Not Write Bad illustrates how we can all write better, more clearly, and for a wider readership. He offers advice on what he calls "not-writing-badly," which consists of the ability, first, to craft sentences that are correct in terms of spelling, diction (word choice), punctuation, and grammar, and that also display clarity, precision, and grace. Then he focuses on crafting whole paragraphs—with attention to cadence, consistency of tone, sentence transitions, and paragraph length. In a fun, comprehensive guide, Yagoda lays out the simple steps we can all take to make our writing more effective, more interesting—and just plain better.
Download or read book The Meaning of Everything written by Simon Winchester and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "We visit the ugly corrugated iron structure that Murray grandly dubbed the Scriptorium -- the Scrippy or the Shed, as locals called it -- and meet some of the legion of volunteers, from Fitzedward Hall, a bitter hermit obsessively devoted to the OED, to W.C. Minor, whose story is one of dangerous madness, ineluctable sadness, and ultimate redemption. The Meaning of Everything is a scintillating account of the creation of the greatest monument ever erected to a living language. Simon Winchester's supple, vigorous prose illuminates this dauntingly ambitious project -- a seventy-year odyssey to create the grandfather of all word-books, the world's unrivaled uber-dictionary. Book jacket."--Jacket.
Download or read book Divining Divas written by Michael Montlack and published by Lethe Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Editor Michael Montlack has assembled an anthology of a hundred gay poets--award winners and fresh voices--in thrall with female icons throughout the ages ranging from Gloria Swanson to Mary J, Blige, from Edith Piaf to Joni Mitchell, Bette Midler to Lady Gaga. These are not merely appreciations of the gorgeous and daring but poems that are confessional to bittersweet to witty.
Download or read book When Things Go Wrong Diseases written by Bill Bryson and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this selection from The Body, his compulsively readable and bestselling owner’s manual to the human body, Bill Bryson introduces us to the mysterious, and often devastating, world of disease. Written with extraordinary insight and filled with remarkable facts, When Things Go Wrong deepens our understanding of the maladies that afflict us--what they are and how they work. A Vintage Short.
Download or read book At Home written by Bill Bryson and published by Doubleday Canada. This book was released on 2013-10-29 with total page 713 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bill Bryson has one of the liveliest, most inquisitive minds on the planet, and At Home is likely to become the most illuminating book on the way we lived then and live now--the why and the where and the how of it--ever written. Now, in this handsome new edition, his sparkling prose will be enhanced by some 200 carefully curated full-colour images from both the past and the present. Selected from a staggering array of sources to bring Bill's journey to vivid life, these pictures will make reading At Home an immersive experience. When you've finished this book, you will see your house--and your daily life--in a new and revelatory light.
Download or read book The Body written by Bill Bryson and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A must-read owner’s manual for every body. Take a head-to-toe tour of the marvel that is the human body in this “delightful, anecdote-propelled read” (The Boston Globe) from the author of A Short History of Nearly Everything. With a new Afterword. “You will marvel at the brilliance and vast weirdness of your design." —The Washington Post Bill Bryson once again proves himself to be an incomparable companion as he guides us through the human body—how it functions, its remarkable ability to heal itself, and (unfortunately) the ways it can fail. Full of extraordinary facts (your body made a million red blood cells since you started reading this) and irresistible Brysonesque anecdotes, The Body will lead you to a deeper understanding of the miracle that is life in general and you in particular. As Bill Bryson writes, “We pass our existence within this wobble of flesh and yet take it almost entirely for granted.” The Body will cure that indifference with generous doses of wondrous, compulsively readable facts and information. As addictive as it is comprehensive, this is Bryson at his very best.
Download or read book Shakespeare written by Bill Bryson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bill Bryson’s bestselling biography of William Shakespeare takes the reader on an enthralling tour through Elizabethan England and the eccentricities of Shakespearean scholarship—updated with a new introduction by the author to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself. His Shakespeare is like no one else's—the beneficiary of Bryson's genial nature, his engaging skepticism, and a gift for storytelling unrivaled in our time.
Download or read book The Lost Continent written by Bill Bryson and published by VNR AG. This book was released on 1989 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the movies from his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs, which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Coma, and Doldrum. At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA, a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost: lost to itself because he found it blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.
Download or read book Seeing Further written by Bill Bryson and published by William Morrow Paperbacks. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Join Bill Bryson on an unforgettable exploration of scientific genius, discovery, and invention. Edited and introduced by Bryson, with original contributions from “a glittering array of scientific writing talent” (Sunday Observer), Seeing Further tells the spectacular story of modern science through the lens of the international Royal Society, founded on a damp November night in London in 1660. Isaac Newton, John Locke, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking—all have been fellows. Its members have split the atom, discovered the double helix and the electron, and given us the computer and the World Wide Web. Gorgeously illustrated with photographs, documents, and treasures from the Society’s exclusive archives, Seeing Further is an unprecedented celebration of the power of ideas. Featuring contributions from more than twenty of the world’s greatest scientific—and science-fiction—thinkers, including: Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene; The God Delusion), James Gleick (The Information), Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon), Richard Holmes (The Age of Wonder), Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale), and Martin Rees (former President of the Royal Society).
