The "pitch" of this book doesn't interest me enough to plough through, frankly. But the warm up—the chapters on linguistics, on Indo-European languages, on the Germanic languages and on the earliest history of the English language are exceptional. I've read a lot of short introductions to Indo-European linguistics, but few that were finer. It posed and answered a number of questions I'd never before encountered. Here, as with the best non-fiction, one gets the sense the author could write an excellent book on any of the topics he touched on, rather than being a narrow specialist ill at ease outside his specialty. ( )