Customer Reviews

Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society

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one of its kind; it is not a dictionary (not even a technical one); it is not a book on the etimology of words; it will hardly improve your talking skills. Rather, it is a fascinating book on the constant change of culture and how this is reflected in everyday (and not so everyday) words of the English language. You will walk away humble, overwhelmed by the richness and the violence of culture's impact on words.

Williams has a point of view that readers must take into account, but perhaps all lexicographers should be as overt about their assumptions as he is in this eminently readable historical glossary of the terms that shape Western thought. It's a good idea when you are writing anything to stop at some point and look up Williams' account of a few of the words that you have been using -- it's guaranteed to focus the mind.

This book is extremely helpful for stopping to ponder what we really mean by words we tend to toss around thoughtlessly: for example Class, Culture, Community. Williams takes a revealing and amazingly well researched historical approach by considering etymological word origins, and how the meanings of words change over time. He also considers how words are used both popularly and academically. This work is especially appropriate for those of us overly-analytical types who like to pick apart and unpack concepts as a matter of course, but the text might feel a little laboured and overly cerebral to the less theoretically minded. I highly recommend this as a much needed reference for graduate students and professional academics in the social sciences, or to very dedicated upper level undergraduates. Unfortunately, the more recent "New Keywords" is not nearly so well done - I think in part because it has multiple authors and ends up feeling a little uneven. It is understandable that it not be able to quite stand up to the original, as Raymond Williams was a genius in his own class.

I had seen a 2007 Portuguese-language translation (first Brazilian edition of this work), of Raymond Williams's 1976 exceptional English book KEYWORDS, at the Saraiva Bookstore of Rio de Janeiro. Besides the drawback of having to read a translation, I had within my hands a hard-cover, bulky--and expensive--book (for s/he who is on a trip this is not "handy" at all!)

As soon as I came back to New York, I logged in to my amazon.com account and found an affordably priced, brand-new Oxford UP paperback (in the original English, of course) which has been delighting me daily ever since. The delivery by Amazon was as fast and as safe as it can be. Never Amazon failed to meet the day of promissed delivery (nor have I ever had purchased merchandise lost on its way, never a defective object of any kind--from a big-screen plasma TV set to a mere CD).
Congrats to Amazon once more for being the most dependable and reliable "virtual shopping center" within the internet.

With respect to Raymond Williams's work: I recommend KEYWORDS to everyone who is interested in the mutability of the meaning --and the growth or wane-- of significant words and their power, "as time goes by." Williams has made an in-depth analysis of the cultural, social, economic, political, and "academic" semantic modifications of an excellent selection of "key" words used in the English language. All of them are prominent signifiers that are or have been common currency among various social strata that attributed them different meanings according to historical change and determining circumstances that provoked those semantic shifts.
As usual, I can't help but recommending to the reader Amazon as the best mean to have this book ASAP.
Cheers!
Hugo Pezzini