A Great Selection of...um..books

Here are two books that you might find worth reading. In keeping with the theme of the Hope Challenge, the first speaks to the great potential and marvelous power of the mind and the other a many layered look at not only how we speak, but how we listen. Uh and um exist in every language, even sign language, with its root going back possibly the first sound of the universe.







http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2009/01/daniel-tammet-on-the-mind/

Daniel Tammet’s mind does not work like most. He’s an autistic savant. One of just fifty or a hundred of his rare kind in the world.

He can recite pi out to 22,000 digits, from memory. And, maybe most unusually, he can talk about how he does it. About the lightning-fast associations and textures of reality that leap out at him.

Daniel Tammet is a savant and a great communicator. And his message is this: As strange and marvelous as his mind may seem, it is not that different from yours. You can learn from the autistic savant.





http://umthebook.com/

"...I wrote Um... because I wanted to know what normal speaking is actually like, and I wanted to talk to people who also had an appreciation for this rich slice of life. Along the way, I learned that Thomas Edison’s earliest recorded word is “uh,” that children begin making slips of the tongue at 18 months, and that Kermit Schafer’s TV and radio bloopers are still pretty funny.

You might think, the person who writes a book about verbal blunders must make a lot of them himself, but I’m a normal speaker. I do know how my blunders differ from yours, though, and what they say about me. Do you know what your verbal blunders say about you?" - Author Michael Erard