Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation » (Reprint)

LYNNE TRUSS is the author of the New York Times bestseller Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door, and The Lynne Truss Treasury: Columns and Three Comic Novels . Eats, Shoots & Leaves, for which she won Britain's Book of the Year Award, has sold over three million copies worldwide. Truss is a regular host on BBC Radio 4, a Times (London) columnist, and the author of numerous radio comedy dramas.

"A bona fide publishing phenomenon, Lynne Truss’s now classic #1 New York Times bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves makes its paperback debut after selling over 3 million copies worldwide in hardcover.

We all know the basics of punctuation. Or do we? A look at most neighborhood signage tells a different story. Through sloppy usage and low standards on the Internet, in e-mail, and now text messages, we have made proper punctuation an endangered species.

In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, former editor Truss dares to say, in her delightfully urbane, witty, and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. From the invention of the question mark in the time of Charlemagne to George Orwell shunning the semicolon, this lively history makes a powerful case for the preservation of a system of printing...

The New York Times

Eats, Shoots & Leaves takes its title from a mispunctuated phrase about a panda. In Britain, where this rib-tickling little book has been a huge success and its panda joke apparently recited in the House of Lords, Ms. Truss has proved to be anything but a lone voice. Despite her assertion that "being burned as a witch is not safely enough off the agenda" for the punctuation-minded stickler, Ms. Truss obviously hit a raw nerve. For those who are tired of seeing signs like "Bobs' Motors" and think an "Eight Items or Less" checkout sign should read "Eight Items or Fewer," boy, is this book for you. — Janet Maslin