Inventing English: A Portable History of English. By Seth Lerer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. viii + 305; 18 illustrations. $24.95.

Seth Lerer's Inventing English is a highly personal book. He describes it as "less a history of English in the traditional sense than…an episodic epic: a portable assembly of encounters with the language" (p. 2). Seeing language itself as a highly personal matter, whether for himself or his readers, he describes the book as tracing a "course between the individual experience and literary culture, between the details of the past and the drama of the present, between the story of my life I tell here and the stories you may make out of your own" (p. 3). In this vein, Lerer returns frequently to the details of how his own youth and education affected his conceptions of English and helped to define his interest in it. And the casual, witty, and sometimes provocative style in which the book is written provides a very apt vehicle for this very personal account.