Here are two sources for two of you writing on these subjects:
'John Lennon: The Life'
By PHILIP NORMAN
Reviewed by NELLIE McKAY
A haunting, mammoth, terrific biography of John Lennon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/books/review/McKay-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3


Excerpt
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/books/excerpt-john-lennon.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3

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'Paul McCartney: A Life'
By PETER AMES CARLIN
Reviewed by SUZANNE VEGA
This biography aims to present Paul McCartney as more
artistically and intellectually complex than the sweet and
bubbly caricature we have known.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/books/review/Vega-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3< and
Lewis Carroll's book for Alice fetches $115K at auction
Last Updated: Friday, December 18, 2009 | 12:45 PM ET Comments8Recommend7
CBC News
A rare copy of Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There that Lewis Carroll presented to the book's real-life inspiration has fetched $115,000 US at auction.

Published in 1871, the first-edition volume was inscribed to Alice Pleasance Liddell by Charles Dodgson, who wrote under the pen name Lewis Carroll.

Its sale was the highlight of Wednesday's children's literature auction by Southern-California based Profiles in History.

The volume — a sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — was sold by retired National Football League player and children's literature collector Pat McInally, who called it "really exciting" to have found a book the author had given to the real Alice.

Liddell was the daughter of the dean at Christ Church, Oxford, where Dodgson worked as a professor.

McInally, the former Cincinnati Bengals star, said the goal of the auction — which featured a host of items from his collection — was so he could focus his efforts on books by A.A. Milne.

Another highlight of Wednesday's sale included Beatrix Potter's own copy of her book The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which sold for $92,000 US.

The auction also featured first-edition copies of several classics, including H.G. Wells's The Time Machine: An Invention, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philsopher's Stone.

Next weeks assignment is your first rewrite of your complete paper. One of you is doing your paper on the problems that studying English can have on your native language. Here is support from Scientific American magazine web site:November 30, 2009 | 7 comments
Language Immersion Impedes Access to Native Tongue
A study in the journal Psychological Science finds that students learning a new language in a total immersion environment had reduced access to their original language. Steve Mirsky reports





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Adults can have a tough time learning a new language. Some opt for language immersion, in which the person spends all their time reading, listening to and speaking the new language. Now research reveals that immersion students do indeed learn the new language faster than students studying the language in a classroom situation—but immersion comes with a price. The work appears in the journal Psychological Science.

Other recent studies of both bilingual people and those learning a new language have shown that both languages appear to be active simultaneously during reading, listening and speaking. Which means that bilingual people have to constantly solve a cognitive problem in order to use the right language at the right time.

En la investigacion, dos groups of American students learned Espanol. Veinte y cinco estudiantes took part en enfrascamiento absoluto de espanol en Espana. Pero un otro grupo studied solamente en la clase at their universidad en los Estados Unidos. Los estudiantes en Espana habla espanol mejor. Pero their English was no so bueno. Call it conservacion de conversacion.

—Esteban Mirsky

[The above text is an exact transcript of the audio in the podcast.]



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