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TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
Shakespeare wasn’t just a literary giant but a tough businessman
In “Shakespeare the ‘hard-headed businessman’ uncovered,” an article that came out in the April 1, 2013 issue of the Independent UK, Jill Lawless reports that researchers from Aberystwyth University in Wales have established that behind his creative genius as an English playwright, William Shakespeare was a hoarder, moneylender, and tax dodger—a ruthless businessman who grew wealthy dealing in grain during a time of famine. The researchers reached the conclusion after combing through historical archives to uncover details of the playwright's parallel life as a grain merchant and property owner whose practices sometimes brought him into conflict with the law.
Jayne Archer, a lecturer in medieval and Renaissance literature and leader of the research team, said that although the idea of Shakespeare as a hardheaded businessman may not fit with romantic notions of the sensitive artist, we shouldn’t judge him too harshly because hoarding grain was his way of ensuring that his family and neighbors would not go hungry if a harvest failed. “Remembering Shakespeare as a man of hunger makes him much more human, much more understandable, much more complex,” she said.
ANOTHER INTERESTING READING:
In his new book The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (Viking Adult, 512 pages), American geographer and evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond takes a provocative and enlightening look at mankind through evolutionary time to help chart a much better future for the human race. Drawing from the folkways of traditional societies like the New Guinea Highlanders, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and several others without romanticizing them, Diamond argues persuasively that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness have much to teach today’s modern societies.
Diamond, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his bestselling book Guns, Germs, and Steel, also makes a credible case in The World Until Yesterday that we should preserve the linguistic diversity that still exists in the world and adopt a “constructive paranoia,” by which he means paying more attention to avoiding the risks of everyday life. Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their review of The World Until Yesterday in the Spring 2013 issue of Democracy Journal, made this assessment of Diamond’s prescriptions: “Though there will be a lot of debate about these arguments and about what scientific evidence is relevant to assessing them, there is little doubt that Diamond has yet again shaped what we will all be debating in the next several years.”
Read an excerpt of Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday in the Penguin Books website now!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He began his scientific career in physiology and expanded into evolutionary biology and biogeography. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Among Dr. Diamond's many awards are the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, Japan's Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Prize honoring the Scientist as Poet, presented by Rockefeller University. He has published more than six hundred articles and several books including the New York Times bestseller "Guns, Germs, and Steel," which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
