Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life by Harry Mount
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Book Summary Author: Harry Mount Reader: Stephen Hoye Edition: Music CD Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published) Format: Audiobook, CD Published: 2007-11-06 ISBN: 1400105242 Publisher: Tantor Media |
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Book Reviews of the Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life
Customer Review: Fun and enjoyable, but a bit sloppily done
Summary: 3 Stars
I just got a copy of this book, which apparently has sold really well in England. As a Latin teacher, I'm all for anything that might benefit the cause, and this is definitely a good book to give to people who don't know anything about Latin and so don't understand its difficulties and rewards. I know another teacher who has considered recommending this to parents of his students, in part so that they can understand how studying Latin differs from studying modern languages. Even if you don't have a child, and are just curious as to what all the fuss about Latin is, it's worth reading this.
For those who took Latin in high school, this should awake (hopefully pleasant) memories, and might help you shake off the cobwebs. It can serve as a nice little refresher, and there's enough Latin in there (always translated) to remind you how much you still know.
Part of the reason that I didn't give the book a higher rating is that there are a few too many mistakes for my taste. While I would not expect a book such as this to give extended grammatical explanations, I would expect the grammar it does cover to be correct, and such is not always the case. If you have no interest in Latin grammar, you can stop reading this review now; suffice it to say that this is a good, but not perfect book, that would benefit greatly from a corrected second edition.
If you are interested in grammar, however, here are a few of the mistakes I found (I didn't start jotting down page numbers until about halfway through the book):
132 - "So the supine always ends in -um...." The supine also can end in -u (when it is an ablative, as opposed to an accusative in -um); he uses such a supine on 115, in 'mirabile dictu' and 'horribile dictu.'
156 - In his chart for the perfect passive, he does not change 'amatus' to 'amati' and 'monitus' to 'moniti,' etc.
179 - he defines 'pro' as "before, in front of," which is fine, though mentioning that it can also mean "on behalf of" would have helped with things like 'pro bono,' and an even fuller discussion of this preposition would have helped with phrases like 'quid pro quo.' I can understand the desire not to overload the reader with definitions, but I think that he could have made a more sensible choice here.
193 - his chart suggests that the interrogative pronoun 'quis, quid' has separate forms in the singular for the masculine and feminine, though this is not the case. Thus his forms 'quam' and 'qua' do not technically exist (for this word, at least).
196 - this has nothing to do with grammar, but for some reason he gives 'miror, -ari' in his vocabulary list for a sentence though no form of that word appears in that sentence.
221 - he says of 'de gustibus non est disputandum,' "A rare use of the gerund," when it is, in fact, a gerundive. He does, however, translate it properly.
The above are some of the most glaring mistakes, and while none of them are all that serious, there's little excuse for them to be there. They would bother me more, I suppose, if I thought that people were going to learn Latin only from this book, but I'm not quite sure that such a thing would be possible (except for the brightest and most motivated).
All in all, it's a nice little book, and I think it does a good job of showcasing what makes Latin unique.