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Summary: Breathes New Life into Old Grammatical Demons
Review: "Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language." ~WittgensteinI had a really good laugh the first time I picked up this book. It was so creative and completely hilarious. Perhaps if you have watched the Buffy shows, you will really relate to this book. Karen Gordon approaches grammar in a most delicious way. I'm sure I will make all sorts of mistakes while writing this review, but the facts are, I am more into the Anais Nin way of writing. You write what you feel you should most of the time. Hopefully reading a lot of books helps! The truth is, I didn't know what a verb was until college because I guess when we lived overseas they taught me that word in another language. I knew how to write sentences, I just had no idea what I was doing "in English." "This is a dangerous game I'm playing, smuggling the injunctions of grammar into your cognizance through a m?nage of revolving lunatics kidnapped into this book." ~Karen Karen is naughty, that I'll admit to. Some of her sentences are well - creative! "She pants at the sight of him."
"Dawn kissed the horizon with its fresh, hot lips."
"She tickled his fancy, which was in need of a good laugh." I guess I'm always confused about using "which" and "that." Here we learn "that" that is a demonstrative Pronoun and which is a relative pronoun. Which refers only to animals and inanimate unmoving things, while "that" refers to animals, things and sometimes people. Ok, I get it now. So, then why did she use "that" in regard to a chair? Mmm It does seem that "which" seems to follow a comma most of the time. Anyway, what we have here is a real comedian writing a grammar book while she was in "transit." As she moved around, she wrote the following chapters: Sentences and What We Mean by Them
Words and What Kinds of Words they Are
Nouns
Verbs
Verbals
More on Verbs
Adjectives and Adverbs
Pronouns
Arriving at Agreements
Phrases
Clauses
Fragments
Comma Splices
The Creation of Sentences Look, after crying over grammar half my life, I was so excited to actually be laughing while reading a grammar book. I really can't say I understood a thing until I read this book. lol Could be the reason I always get crushes on English Professors. They seem so terribly smart in comparison to my limited knowledge. With this book, you can leave the dry English textbook approach and sink Your Fangs into some tasty Grammar. Otherwise, grammar gives me a real headache.
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Summary: A Salacious Start to Syntactical Study
Review: A book that describes verbs as the heartthrobs of sentences can't be all bad. With vivid imagery in grammatical examples and exhortations, one can effortlessly gobble up this book before you know it, licking your lips with verbal blood. Gordon is =thorough=, naming grammatical entities I never knew even had names (often very suggestive names, too - expletive nouns and copulative verbs. I suppose Mom was right - there =are= naughty words!) However, I would suggest this as a start to investigating grammar and writing style. Gordon's explanations are truly bare bones; for example, she simply indicates one will be chastised for splitting infinitives, but doesn't indicate =why= splitting infinitives is seen as wrong. The reason why: 17th and 18th century grammarians decided that English grammar should be logical. Since the most logical language they knew was formal Latin, and since one couldn't split infinitives in Latin (because they are one word in that language), they decided that one shouldn't be able to split infinitives in English, either. However, "to go boldly" has a whimper of an impact compared to "to boldly go". Similarly, grammarians did away with double negatives and duplicated superlatives (native to the English language, back to the Old English) for added emphasis. Why don't =you= tell the Rolling Stones they should've sang "I Can't Get Any Satisfaction", and then you can tell Shakespeare to cut out "most" of "the most unkindest cut of all". However, you can't go wrong with the grammatical and stylistic rules found in Gordon's Gothic grammar; it's a great place to begin, and one is entertained in the process. If one doesn't know how to work within those rules, one can't tell when it is legitimate to break them. So why don't you boldly go and get satisfaction from this book?
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Summary: A book that can turn any student into a lover of grammar!
Review: A wonderful book to introduce (or brush up on) the rules of grammar without ever forgetting the beauty and playfulness of the language. As a teacher, I owe a debt of thanks to Ms. Gordon and her gothic cast of characters in the _The Deluxe Transitive Vampire_ for giving me a text will help me to show my students the heights that their writing can achieve.
Chris Lehmann
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Summary: The quintessential grammar-really-can-be-fun read.
Review: At age 54, starting to write for the first time, it seemed only natural to scour the shelves of my local purveyor of books for helpful references. Both the cover and the title of this book fairly leapt into my visual field, making it impossible to leave the vampire--or his debutante--on the shelf. Not only did it clearly answer my rather pedestrian questions about the various parts of speech, etc., it did so with gusto, elan, humor, and very clever self-defining plays on words. More importantly, Ms. Gordon's characters brought home to me WHY these various grammatical entities were essential, showing me ways to convey intent, innuendo, shadings of meaning, and so forth that have been immensely helpful. I recommend this book to writers, writers-manque, lovers of both the English language as well as linguistics in general. Not to be missed.
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Summary: .
Review: Definitely the most entertaining this subject can possibly be. The author is obviously very smart and i admire her to write something like this. koodos to you, koodos
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Summary: Grammer for everyone....
Review: Fans of Anne Rice should love this! A grammer book you can read, and read, and read just for fun. You will learn and enjoy all at once. A must for school and college students students that need extra help. A absolute must for writers.
Rating: 
Summary: A delicious romp through language
Review: Gordon again gives us a whimsical tour of the English language. A familiar cast of characters featuring baby vampires and chimera abound throughout the pages to demonstrate the parts of speech and sentence structure. Although this book will work as a review or a teaching tool, the vocabulary may dissuade the beginner from reading it. For instance, what exactly is a chimera or a samovar? If you don't know, you can still learn from the book, but you will not get the humor. I would read a sample before purchasing. One of the nice touches this book has is the inclusion of margins. The author invites you to make notes and comments to help enhance the experience. This is very helpful. I would recommend this book more as a review than as a beginner's book. The format is not conducive to quick reference. It is a fun and educational read.
Rating:
Summary: A delicious romp through language
Review: Gordon again gives us a whimsical tour of the English language. A familiar cast of characters featuring baby vampires and chimera abound throughout the pages to demonstrate the parts of speech and sentence structure. Although this book will work as a review or a teaching tool, the vocabulary may dissuade the beginner from reading it. For instance, what exactly is a chimera or a samovar? If you don't know, you can still learn from the book, but you will not get the humor. I would read a sample before purchasing. One of the nice touches this book has is the inclusion of margins. The author invites you to make notes and comments to help enhance the experience. This is very helpful. I would recommend this book more as a review than as a beginner's book. The format is not conducive to quick reference. It is a fun and educational read.
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Summary: Edward Gorey school of grammar
Review: I am surprised at the negativity of some of these reviews (also of the author's other book! I think some people take grammar too seriously--it is not a religion.) This book is hysterically funny as well as being factual, but i guess it is not everyone's cup o'tea, so to speak. It does offer decent grammar instruction. The examples are random and bizarre but this is no liability, in my opinion. The stranger and more creative a sentence, the more I pay attention to it. Being an English teacher of gifted children, I can tell you that if I use bizarre and amusing grammar examples, students pay attention. Although I do not use concubines and gargoyles in my grammar lessons, I am inspired to be a little more creative when providing examples for my students. I think this book can help one to write well in many ways--it helps prove that grammar can be creative and interesting. It also helps to connect grammar to actual writing in that it is extremely creative and suggests a story or a plot. It also is a welcome relief from the "drill and kill" method taught when I was a student--that did not help me one bit. I wouldn't use this book to teach my kids, but I do prefer to reference it when I am checking something--it puts a smile on my face and puts me in a good mood. When tackling something as inherently boring and conservative as grammar, that is a plus!
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Summary: The best book on grammar I have ever read
Review: I first read this several years ago when I was editor-in-chief of a medical journal, POSTGRADUATE MEDICINE. I found it right on target and much fun. Would that newspaper reporters might see this marvelous book and be appropriately influenced by it.
Robert B. Howard, MD
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