THE LANGUAGE BOOK.

By FranklinFolsom '28. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1963. 201 pp. $5.95.

In The Language Book, Franklin Folsom, an old hand at writing for young audiences, not only tells "the whole dramatic story of language from tom-toms to Telstar" but does so with an unerring sense of what will appeal to young readers. Children will enjoy these pages alive with people of every age and place — from cavemen to astronauts, from Eskimos to Australian aborigines.

Parents, too, will find stimulating Mr. Folsom's way of gathering facts and insights about communication from every field, for he brings in such varied topics as baseball signals and Semaphore, the figure-eight flights of bees and the discourse of dolphins, Indian picture and sign language, "magic" words, pig Latin and Esperanto, poetry composed by computers, and the great detective stories of archeology.

All this fascinating factual information is woven into a sound and meaningful story of the development of language, spoken and written, and is used to underscore the basic ideas of the book: That language is univer sal, necessary to create and sustain civilization, vital to all human activity - that it is indeed, "the most human thing there is."

With over 250 eye-catching illustration (half of them in color), plus a good index and lists of source materials, The LanguageBook should be of great value to teachers and might well inspire and help them to give language study its due in our schools.

Mrs. Norman, the mother of two youngreaders, is an editor of a modern language review and an advanced studentof languages.