Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Author Lynne Truss is not above vigilantism. Indeed, given her druthers, Truss would arm the citizenry—that portion of it, at least, that takes its punctuation very seriously—with permanent markers and Wite-Out and set it loose on a world of greengrocers' signs marred by misplaced apostrophes. And she mightn't stop there:

"No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, 'Good food at it's best', you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave."

Truss's plea for violent action in the face of mixed up itses may go unheeded, but her light-hearted, best-selling paean to punctuation, originally published in Great Britain (and retaining British punctuation practices), has clearly tapped into a vein of previously voiceless pedants who believe that the lives of punctuation marks are worth celebrating. Evidently, as Truss writes, "a lot of well-educated sensitive people really have been weeping friendlessly in caves for the past few years, praying for someone—anyone—to write a book about punctuation with a panda on the cover."

Published in the U.S. in 2004 with an (unremarkable) introduction by Frank McCourt (author of Angela's Ashes), Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves is a breezy, funny account of the history, abuse, and proper use of a host of punctuation marks—the apostrophe (with which the author's affections clearly lie), the comma, the semi-colon (failure to use which was, according to George Bernard Shaw, "a symptom of mental defectiveness"), the exclamation point (among punctuation marks "the big attention-deficit brother who gets over-excited and breaks things and laughs too loudly"), and so on. The book is a quick, amusing read, and it is besides an attractive little volume, panda-covered, of course: the perfect gift for the sticklers in your life.