Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Sketchy and Disappointing, 10 Oct 2002
By A Customer
Frankly, I expected better. Based on the title ("Baby Names Around the World!") I expected ... well, I expected a well-researched and well-thought out analysis of baby names around the world.Instead, it's like the author looked at the newspaper in a few dozen countries, picked out a bunch of random names from the articles and called it a baby name book. We even looked at some stats from here in Holland of the top 20 Most Popular names of the past year, and not ONE of the names was in the "Dutch Names" section of this book; conversely, not ONE of the names in this book was on the real-world list. Similar results appear when you compare this book with the Most Popular name lists from the U.S. and U.K. It's not so much that the names he includes are "weird" ... just inaccurate. Plus the number of names in the book ("Over 50,000!") is padded by listing separately many variations of same name (e.g. John, Jon, Jonathon, Jonathan, etc.), which better and more complete books group together to show their common roots. Truthfully, we did a lot better finding decent (and realistic) lists of international baby names on some of the very good web sites on the subject than from this book.
|
|
|
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
??? around the world ???, 21 Nov 2001
By A Customer
I have to say that I was tempted into purchasing this book by its title, suggestiong that I would find an international cross-section of names and their meanings.
Lansky provides many names (as do many other books on the same topic), but are they truely international? It seems that he has taken a few dictionaries and plucked a few words from each of these which he is now selling to us as a name of the country that speaks the respective language! I cannot prove this in most languages as I am not one of those languistic miracles (wouldn't need a book like that then..), but as German is my mother tongue I can tell you that, yes, 'Kaiser' means Emperor, but no-one would consider that a valid first name in any german speaking country. Or 'Bing' (apparently menaing: 'kettle-shaped hollow' - no such thing!) is not a name (or word) I have ever seen in a german speaking country either. Other words such as 'Clovis', are hardly even German, but apparently mean 'Famous Soldier'! Never heard of it.
All this undermines the purpose of the book and I suggest that if you like a name from THIS book, go and double-check it and its meaning (and that it is, in fact, used as a name in the first place - if this is important to you) in ANOTHER book!! Sorry...
|
|
|
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best book of names I've found, 3 April 2001
I am not having a baby- I'm just interested in names, so I got a couple of these 'baby names' books and this one was by far the best. It has all the names first by which country they come from, then alphabetically, and includes a very comprehensive passage of the origin and meaning of each name.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
