"Imprisoned in a remote Turkish prison camp during World War I, having survived a two-month forced march and a terrifying shootout in the desert, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, join forces to bamboozle their iron-fisted captors. To stave off despair and boredom, Jones takes a handmade Ouija board and fakes elaborate séances for his fellow prisoners. Word gets around camp, and one day, a Turkish officer approaches Jones with a...

"Imagine a village where everyone "speaks" sign language. Just such a village - an isolated Bedouin community in Israel with an unusually high rate of deafness - is a the heart of Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind. There, an indigenous sign-language has sprung up, used by deaf and hearing villagers alike. It is a language no outsider has been able to decode, until now." "A New York Times reporter trained as a linguist, Margalit...