Discourse constructions of youth identities is an eclectic collection of 12 papers which examine the language of youth in England, Greece, Turkey, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Japan. The authors use various methodologies, including narrative analysis, conversational analysis, sociolinguistics, and Critical Discourse Analysis, to look at the language practices of youth ranging in age from nine years to the early twenties. In addition to studies of spontaneous peer group interaction in schools and youth centers, the volume also includes work on various kinds of expressive culture, focus group interactions, and interviews.

There is little doubt that critical applied linguistics is one of the most controversial and contentious areas in linguistics today. This new book, Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction, is an attempt to provide a much-needed detailed and comprehensive introduction to this emergent approach. It is written by Alastair Pennycook of the University of Technology, Sydney, who has been one of the major proponents of critical applied linguistics during the past decade.

In Sista, speak! Sonja Lanehart presents the language and literacy autobiographies of three generations of African American women. These women tell the stories of their education and aspirations, focusing on how their literacy and language were influenced by social, economic, and political forces within school, family and community. Lanehart interprets the rich descriptions in their stories by examining the ideological perspectives of “experiences and cultures and ecologies” that shaped the women's views of themselves and their worlds” (p. 29).

Coulmas's new book, Writing systems, is intended as a textbook for use in upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level courses dealing with written languages and literacy from the standpoint of linguistics and anthropology. The book provides an excellent and comprehensive introduction to the linguistic analysis of writing, and it offers detailed illustrations of the world's major writing systems and their social consequences, ranging from the birth of graphic signs as mnemonics to social stratification resulting from issues of literacy in modern society. Geared particularly toward the interests of linguists, the book places strong emphasis on the multiple levels of the form-sound nexus and the structural complexities of various writing systems around the world. It is accompanied by a concise exposition of the history of writing and a review of current investigations into reading and writing in psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Overall, Coulmas does a first-rate job of linking the origin, development, and spread of writing to the growing interest in the linguistically motivated analysis of writing and its relation to the mind and society. Although the chapters cut across several layers of writing analysis, the historical, educational, and ideological issues of literacy are given less attention than might be expected, owing to the author's focus on the linguistic aspects of writing. At the end of each chapter, exercises are provided for mastery of basic concepts and issues discussed.

Stephen J. Caldas, Raising bilingual-biliterate children in monolingual cultures. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. xvi, 231. Pb. $39.95.

This is the fascinating story of the author's own family project of raising his three children French-English bilingually in English-speaking Louisiana. Caldas, a French-English bilingual himself, and his bilingual French-Canadian wife artificially orchestrate and manipulate the children's environments from birth to adolescence to ensure that the children develop full bilingual proficiency and biliteracy in French and English. Caldas's and his wife's main strategy is to speak only French to their son and their identical twin daughters. They also commit to use only French with each other, thus creating an all-French-speaking home environment. The Caldases also enroll the children in French immersion school and make extensive use of French-language media to further expose the children to French. Finally, the author and his wife purchase a cottage in Quebec where they spend the summers, providing the children with authentic societal language immersion. The outcome of this extraordinary experiment is that, by adolescence, all three children are completely bilingual and biliterate in French and English and can be easily mistaken as native speakers of both Quebecois French and American English.

What makes Russians Russian? Is it a special national character, or their common emotional or intellectual spirit? Ries helps us get rid of these slippery essentialist commonplaces with her interpretative anthropological study of Muscovites' everyday private talk around 1990. Her effort is outstanding in both description and theory: Few have undertaken to describe and analyze Russian (or Eastern European) urban everyday discourse from the anthropological perspective, as she does (though recent macro-studies and studies of public discourse are more numerous). At the same time, she creates and defends a thesis of everyday talk as a vital medium of social value creation and maintenance – as it constructs “Russianness,” in her example.