Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

A triumph of crass commercial misinformation and hyperbolic dilettantism over actual learning. Bragg and his handlers, in their rush to make a quick buck, seem barely to have skimmed a few shady amateur websites for their facts. Those readers with any education will find their eyebrows rising with incredulity to read that the Indo-European languages stem originally from India; that English is a rarity among languages for not being controlled by a French-style scholarly academy; that Shakespeare, apparently in need of even more credit, invented no fewer than 2,000 new English words; and that Bede apparently had a time machine, since his quotation of the then 300-year-old letter to Aetius is related as if Bede were the author. Beyond the unblinking confusion over basic facts, the story-telling style ham-handedly anthropomorphizes English itself, alternately "wanting all the space it could claim" or growing "confident enough to take on newcomers", as a "battle-hardened" hero with mysteriously unique qualities, smacking of manifest destiny, that could only be perceived by an author who has never read the history of any other language or heard of the concept of sampling bias. For example, English is characterized as having an almost superhumanly unique "capacity to absorb other" languages, in a breathless description requiring the support of no fewer than three sinister adjectives - "cunning", "subtle", and "ruthless" - just in one sentence. Telling, then, that the guileless five-star reviewers' praise emphasizes such qualities as "easy to read". The less undiscerning will balk at hunting out the residue of actual knowledge from among Bragg's galloping storytelling, unless as a parlor game, and will find far more profit with any of a large number of excellent, slightly less easy alternatives. And by the way, the English translations from Frisian omit entire clauses.