In a nutshell, Kung Fu High School is Bruce Lee's film The Big Boss rewritten as a teen drama, with Jen's cousin Jimmy taking Bruce's role as the quiet out-of-towner who'd promised his mum he wouldn't fight, eventually forced to unleash his fists of fury on the local druglord.The last third of the novel is one long action sequence, in which Jen and Jimmy fight their way through the school corridors towards Ridley, the big boss. The principal, a shotgun-wielding ex-Marine, beats the students up too and he and his teachers, the cops, and the whole corrupt town are on the payroll of 23-year-old student Ridley, who operates his drug-running empire from the school cafeteria.Kung Fu High School was written after the Columbine shooting, which directly affected its young, Colorado-raised author. They also carry knives, wear body armour and fight each other daily. Although Kung Fu High got its nickname because of the number of Asian American kids who attend it, actually the student body is entirely mixed - "we were all the colour of poor," Jen explains. But 99.5 per cent of the students know at least one martial art, so the name is still apposite. McWhorter's rhetoric is persuasive but finally he has to concede that overall the democratisation of language which he's described is probably a good thing.
And so long as we continue to read and appreciate classics of English literature written before 1960, which we surely will, I can't see that there's much of a problem.Kung Fu High School by Ryan Gattis (SCEPTRE £7.99) Fifteen-year-old Jen B is doing her best to survive high school. The flux of vocabularies, spelling and grammar is a linguist's m?er, and hardly something he'd rail against. It's more that, if we no longer trouble ourselves to compose our thoughts in elegant prose, then our language - and our thoughts themselves - will become ever more impoverished. Hollywood actors stopped talking like Noel Coward characters and began to Method mumble, and Beat poets and novelists eschewed artful sentence structures in favour of chaotic interior monologues. In short, we abandoned the carefully considered, written form of language in favour of the oral and the conversational. Technology either enabled or hastened the switch as public oratory gave way to television, and now mobiles and email encourage ever more informal epistles.Thankfully, his gripe is not the common - but erroneous, he argues - complaint that standards are slipping.
Weaving together these lives and personal histories into a very satisfying narrative, Appignanesi also links them to their nations' history and asserts that, like her characters, Austria and Poland still need to confront the past in order to heal scars that linger in the collective consciousness.Doing Our Own Thing by John McWhorter (ARROW £7.99) John McWhorter is an American linguistic scientist who loves language and is dismayed that his countrymen no longer seem to share his passion. The thrust of his thesis is that, round about the time of the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s, America rejected formality, with its attendant established codes of required conduct, and embraced authenticity and "doing your own thing". Travelling with him are his black adopted daughter, a Polish ?gr?ournalist, and another neuroscientist whose name has an uncomfortable resonance for Bruno. Bruno Lind is a world-renowned neuroscientist specialising in memory, who accepts an invitation to speak at a conference in Vienna. It's the city of his birth, but he hasn't been back there since 1938, when his childhood was violently disrupted by the Anschluss.
