Reception
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Charles Harrington Elster calls the book a "pleasantly discursive and affectionate tribute to an antiquated art" in which Florey explains the concept and history of sentence diagramming with sentences by Lewis Carroll, Woody Allen, Henry James, Marcel Proust, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner. Publishers Weekly says Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog is "part memoir, part literary gossip, but mostly a guide to the lost art of sentence diagramming" which "hilariously ... answers such questions as, Why did Gertrude Stein hate commas? Was Mark Twain or James Fenimore Cooper the better grammarian? And why ... is George W. Bush such a lousy speaker?"
Read more about this topic: Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History And Lost Art Of Diagramming Sentences
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)