Rather dry account of some of the history of linguistics. Because this edition was published in the seventies, it does have the benefit of not focusing on Noam Chomsky quite as much (because, of course, there wasn't much of his theory to concentrate on!) and gives a better picture of some of the linguists that came before him, which was satisfying. Fewer textbooks today will tell you much about, say, Jacob Grimm except to tell you about Grimm's Law, and some of the linguists in this book simply aren't mentioned in the textbooks I've read.

I wouldn't recommend this for the casual reader who wants to pick up a book about linguistics, but I would strongly suggest it for a reader who has a more solid grounding in linguistics—perhaps a second-year linguistics major or the general audience whose hobby is linguistics. It simply requires a little more background knowledge to be accessible. ( )

slim but classic ( )