WENDY LESSER, EDITOR
The Genius of Language: Fifteen Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongue

Joseph Conrad, the most successful ESL student of all time, said about the language in which he wrote his novels, “English for me was neither a choice nor adoption. The merest idea of choice had never entered my head. And as to adoption – well, yes, there was adoption; but it was I who was adopted by the genius of the language.”

Conrad (for whom English was, in fact, a third, not a second, language) is invoked often by the writers Wendy Lesser has rounded up to contribute to her fine collection “The Genius of Language: Fifteen Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongues” (Pantheon, 241 pages, $23), Ms. Lesser’s contemporary Conrads – writers who write in English though it’s not their first language – have delivered charming, moving, and funny reflections on childhood, family, nationality, and ethnicity, as well as language.

In “Yes and No,” Amy Tan hilariously explodes the notion of the supposed “deference” of the Chinese language. It’s true, she says, that there’s no one word for “yes” or “no” in Chinese, but this is the result not of meekness but precision: “Ask, ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ and the answer refers directly to the proposition being asserted or denied: stopped already, still have not, never beat, have no wife. What could be clearer?”

Many of the pieces treat linguistic particulars with the mixture of attention and passion that comes from falling in love. M.J. Fitzgerald’s turn from English is as full of emotion: “I loved the accumulation of adjectives that a language so rich in words could indulge in. … I loved the exaggeration of English, the curlicues of language, its baroque quality.” In his essay “French Without Tears,” Luc Sante is as specific and loving about the “silken chains of prepositions that give French its incantatory power” as he is about the “plain, unadorned demotic speech, resolutely laconic and flat” of a certain sort of American English, which he illustrates with the first sentence of “The Postman Always Rings Twice”: “They threw me off the hay truck about noon.”

Almost all of these essays deal with the disorientation of parents in a strange land, the simultaneous shame and loyalty of their children, and the conflicting roles of language as mother, chauvinist, liberator, betrayer, and savior. Ms. Tan’s mother warns that “In America a Chinese person could starve to death. If you say you don’t want it, they won’t ask you again forever.” Leonard Michaels’s mother refuses to speak Polish – “Her memory of the pogroms made it unspeakable.”

That these stories are necessarily about childhood helps account for their authority and profundity. Only a few disappoint: Bert Keizer and Gary Shteyngart glut the reader with parades of gratuitous pop references; Ariel Dorfman is characteristically self-aggrandizing and tedious. But two or three others – including the final essay, the funny, courageous, ominous “My Yiddish” by the late Michaels – are genuinely transporting.

– Alec Solomita

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DAVID OWEN
Copies in Seconds: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine

The kitchen at 32-05 37th Street in Queens looks almost exactly as it did when Chester Carlson made the first photocopy. The beauty salon on the ground floor is now a pizzeria, but the second floor window is still there, the one he used to read the first ever photographic copy. It gave the date and place of its making:

10-22-38
Astoria

This piece of paper now resides in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Carlson was a scientist by nature and an inventor by choice. For much of his youth, he lived in desperate poverty, trying to support an arthritic father for years while attending Caltech and then New York Law School. The detailed story of how he came to research and discover the xerographic process, and the decades of intensive research on the part of two companies’ physicists and chemists to determine how best to build the machine, is best left to David Owen, the author of “Copies in Seconds” (Simon & Schuster, 305 pages, $24).

As a patent attorney, he saw a tremendous need for a better means of copying documents. Carbon paper served offices for the first half of the century. Baby Boomers and older Gen-Xers remember the literally purple prose created by mimeograph machines – an expensive device that demanded special ink and special master sheets. Offset printing shops served engineers, publishing houses, and others who needed specialized copying, but for everyday duplicating, there was nothing – until 1960, when, after 22 years of development at Batelle and Haloid Xerox, the 914 copier rolled off the production line on its way to King of Prussia, Pa.

Mr. Owen is perfectly suited to the task of writing about the photocopier’s inventor, if only because he himself is just a little nuts. Here’s a man who, early in the narration, purchases a $400 photocopier. Then, copier installed, he spends several weeks looking for things to photocopy and ends up making several copies of the copier manual.

Such quirkiness yields all sorts of rewards, including a quick-moving narrative and many offbeat observations. My favorite: The list “historically important xerographic photoreceptors is oddly similar to the list of active ingredients in popular dandruff shampoos.” Spending 300 pages with Mr. Owen and Chester Carlson was an unexpected pleasure.

– Eric Wolff