The Names of Things is a book about a man and a generation. Born to a working-class family in Toronto, David Helwig grew up in the haunted town of Niagara-on-the-Lake long before it became a fashionable summer destination for charter coaches of American tourists. David won a scholarship from General Motors to attend the University of Toronto and launched himself into theatrical productions at Hart House and mingled with such writers as John Robert Colombo, Henry Beissel, Edward Lacey, David Lewis Stein and Edna Paris. After working in summer stock with young actors including Timothy Findley, Gordon Pinsent and Jackie Burroughs, he spent a couple of years in the suburbs of Birkenhead, then moved to Kingston where, in the 1960s he shared the world of little magazines with Tom Marshall and Michael Ondaatje and the world of prisons with the inmates he taught. In the 1970s he worked under John Hirsch at the CBC. He edited books for Oberon Press. He was part of the generation of young Canadian writers who believed they could achieve anything. He also shares a touching account of family life, of learning to be a father. Poetry, some of it never before published, catches the echoes of the life he lived. From childhood during the Second World War to becoming a grandfather at the millennium, this is the story of one man and his connections with the history of Canada in the latter part of the twentieth century.

Rhyming text depicts a father sharing with his child such things as seven words that all mean blue and the name of every kind of cloud.

Finalist for the 2013 Chautauqua Prize "The writing in The Names of Things is beautiful, hypnotic, and exacting…" — Huffington Post Books "With vivid detail and thoughtful prose, Wood delivers a unique and heartbreaking story of love, loss, and the universal human experience of seeking acceptance." —The Los Angeles Review "Quietly affecting…This is an exciting debut, an author with a distinctive experience and a lovely and powerful voice." — Terrain.org “You seize a bit of life, and life damages you.” The anthropologist’s wife, an artist, didn’t want to follow her husband to the remote desert of northeast Africa to live with camel-herding nomads. But wanting to be with him, she endured the trip, only to fall desperately ill years later with a disease that leaves her husband with more questions than answers. When the anthropologist discovers a deception that shatters his grief and guilt, he begins to reevaluate his love for his wife as well as his friendship with one of the nomads he studied. He returns to Africa to make sense of what happened, traveling into the far reaches of the Chalbi Desert, where he must sift through the layers of his memories and reconcile them with what he now knows. Set in a windswept wilderness menaced by hyenas and lions, The Names of Things weaves together the stories of an anthropologist’s journey into the desert, his firsthand accounts of the nomads' death rituals, and his struggle to find the names of things for which no words exist. Anthropologist John Colman Wood’s debut novel is an exquisite, haunting exploration of the meaning of love and the rituals of grief.

The book is concerned with the child's acquisition of names (by which is meant words that refer to objects - including proper names, common nouns in some uses, and pronouns in some uses). Four chapters in the book's first section, Matters Mainly Psychological, describe empirical observations that explore how a child copes with the fact that many different name-like words can be applied to a single object. A second major section, Matters Mainly Linguistic, contains chapters on phonology, the learning of grammatical categories, the definite and indefinite articles, and the plural. A third section, Matters Mainly Philosophical, focuses entirely on the complex issues of reference and meaning. A final chapter reflects on the implications of the book for developmental psychology.An MIT Press/Bradford Book.

It was not easy for Susan Brind Morrow to leave her rural New York home for the Egyptian desert. But once she was there, the tragic memories of two dead siblings and a childhood of eccentric withdrawal crumbled in the dry heat along with any notion of safety. This book interweaves a moving memoir of an American childhood with an adventurous woman's courageous search for hidden meanings.

Why is a horse called a horse? and not a giraffe or a flapdoodle? Discover philosophy with Plato!