"The Mother Tongue" by Bill Bryson

This book vacillated between the incredibly profound and the somewhat trivial. I adored the sections when it made history come alive, in the same way that Connections made science and warfare relevant, by describing the ways in which conquests or trends influenced language (the Norman invasion, e.g.). Occasionally, however, the text delved too deeply into trivialities, such as the fifty ways a certain word might be pronounced. Some paragraphs were only of skimmable interest... but not so many, so the book still gets a 2/3.