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Are you disinterested or uninterested? When do you say alternately or should it be alternatively? These are words we hear everyday; but they are often confused and misused, even in the mainstream media. Help is at hand. The famous English author Kingsley Amis's last book The King's English will provide professional writers and those who care about their language, expert guidance in the usage of English.

Amis is best known for his novels such as Lucky Jim and the Old Devils, but he was also a skilled observer and commentator on late 20th Century life and language. Amis died in 1995, with this book being published posthumously, two years later.

In this book, he takes us from the classic formalism of old-school academic scholars with their groundings in Latin and Greek, through to the street-wise pop-media of the contemporary world. He bridges the gap between the rigorous, proscribed rules of the original 1926 classic H.W. Fowler's Modern English Usage and the modern, pragmatic world where English is recognised as the global language. Despite being an Englishman, Amis acknowledged the ascendancy and the practical "correctness" of American English.

Amis in his book is very careful not to be too pedantic with his comments. In his entry on the pronunciation of kilometre, he argues against the common practice of stressing the second syllable and therefore making it sound like a device to measure items grouped in thousands. Amis assures us such a device once existed, but he concludes "not many people know that, or would care if they did."

Amis has fun criticising - and gently mocking - fashionable trends in writing, particularly in the field of newspaper journalism. In his entry on headlines, Amis gives examples of sub-editors stringing together three or more nouns to make a headline, such as, SCHOOL COACH CRASH DRAMA. He also criticises the journalistic trick of overloading descriptions in one sentence, which he calls the "gorged-snake construction."

Political abuse of the language is also put under the Amis spotlight. How often do we hear politicians "refuting", when all they are doing is denying, and not proving the falsity of the allegation, which is what the word really means?

The King's English is not an exhaustive guide to language use, but anybody who makes a living from writing or takes other people's writing seriously will want to keep a copy of this book close by their dictionary. Should we be implying or inferring this? Either way, this book is inspirational, amusing as well as instructive.

This book shouldn't REALLY be your usage guide. Used as one, it would leave you feeling befuddled, and perhaps belittled. But it reads a bit like a usage guide, with an alphabetical list of topics for Amis's rants, e.g., "genteelisms," "whom," "get," etc. With insults freely being applied to people who speak in certain ways, however, it is more like a collection of Amis's opinions, to be used in conjunction with a real usage guide (as Amis admits in the introduction).

I am giving this book 5 stars because I am a language pedant, and find this stuff extremely entertaining. I read through it excitedly in one sitting; it's fascinating to me to find out what grammar points irk other language pedants. If you are not a language pedant, however, you may be bored by this book.

Certainly, you will enjoy this reading.

The text is HUGE and spread out - a lot like those self-help books that one can zip through in about half an hour. Some of the topics were interesting but by and large this was a tale of modern English.

The chapter titled "In Praise of English" makes us grateful that ours is a language that puts so many words at our disposal -- remarkable for their sheer number as well as for their variety. Because English has so freely adopted words from other languages, we often have many choices about how we will express an idea -- whether we will use short words derived from Anglo-Saxon, for example, or more luxurious words derived from French.

Although Lederer's subject matter is serious, his style never becomes ponderous. His short chapters and lively prose keep the reader engaged. And occasionally he cannot resist playing, as in the chapter titled "The Case for Short Words," where for four paragraphs he restricts himself to one-syllable words.

Of special interest are the chapters about literary giants -- William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, and George Orwell -- and the contributions they have made not only to our literature but also to our language. For example, Shakespeare is credited with the first use of over 1,700 words, nearly eight percent of the different words that he used in his writing. In addition, his plays include many phrases that have become titles of novels and many others that have been repeated so often that they have become clichés.

Lederer also includes many inspiring quotations about English and entries from the ground-breaking dictionaries of Samuel Johnson and Ambrose Bierce. (Can you imagine undertaking the formidable task of writing the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language?)

Lederer champions letter writing, poetry writing, libraries, reading, the effective use of English. Particularly poignant is the example of mistranslation of one word that led to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Lederer fondly portrays English as a thriving, evolving entity. By instilling appreciation for the legacy we have received, he inspires us to safeguard its future.