There are two distinct threads here – one about the hyphen as a grammatical symbol, its evolution over the centuries and its place in contemporary writing – and the use of the hyphen in creating or perhaps emphasising identity, its use as a political and cultural signifier (Afro-American for example), a very on-trend issue but for me nowhere near as interesting as the grammatical hyphen which I’d hoped the book would concentrate on. Can’t help feeling the book unsuccessfully tries to link two disparate themes which would have been better kept separate. So I enjoyed some of the book but not enough to give it a higher rating.

Going into Hyphen, I expected a historical overview of this mysterious for me piece of punctuation. However, had I paid more attention to the clever cover design or been acquainted with Mahdavi's work, I'd know this book would be about something else entirely - race in America. Taking the experiences of four individuals, herself and three of her students, from different cultural backgrounds, she traces the complex history and meaning of the hyphen in the hyphenated Americans and its role as a space to negotiate and discover their identities.

I truly related to the experiences of this author and loved the way they analyzed these individual experiences. As a person with a "hyphen" in my identity as well, I have always struggled to find a place where I truly belonged. Mahdavi assesses this issue through an analysis of the grammar itself and its roots. Highly recommend!

The Bloomsbury Object Lesson series is made up of short volumes on the cultural impact of everyday objects. While this series has been diverse in both its subject matter and authors, the books basically fall into two categories. Some titles, like the ones on golf balls, phone booths and cigarette lighters, present a straightforward history of the objects in question. Other authors use the object as a metaphor for whatever hobbyhorse they wish to opine about.
For example, Kara Thompson's book on blankets is mainly about President Trump's immigration policies. While Jean-Michel Rabate's Rust spends many pages analyzing Victorian art critic, John Ruskin's theory of colors.
The latest volume in the series, Hyphen by Pardis Mahdavi, takes a hybrid approach. There are chapters about the invention and development of this oft-maligned punctuation mark. An interesting section details the controversy that erupted when the Shorter Oxford Dictionary eliminated most hyphenated words.
But the bulk of Hyphen concerns America's contradictory attitudes towards hyphenated Americans. We celebrate ethnic holidays like Saint Patrick's Day, Cinco de Mayo and Hanukkah. But the country has always harbored a xenophobic suspicion of any group that is not White and Protestant.
There are also contradictions between hyphenated Americans themselves. Mahdavi's parents fled to the US from Iran during the early days of the Revolution and they tried to give her a traditional Persian upbringing. But, as you might expect, she rebelled against their patriarchal traditions. Mahdavi grew up to become a feminist scholar at Arizona State and the college's dean of social sciences.
Mahdavi returned to Iran to research the feminist movement there and was promptly arrested by the Revolutionary Guards. The chapter on her harrowing experience as prisoner of these fanatics is the most interesting one in the book. Unfortunately, she sketches the events briefly and does not explain what led to her release or what happened to the other women detained with her.
Hyphen also tells the story of some of Mahdavi's students and the balancing act they must maintain to survive in the dominant culture. There is a Nigerian-American whose desire to play college football is blocked by his tradition-bound mother. After a tragedy, he winds up at ASU only to be pressured by African-Americans on the team to take a knee during the national anthem. Meanwhile, his father, an army veteran, insists they he show respect for the flag.
It is stories like these that make Hyphen compelling reading. However, the hybrid nature of the book works against it. An account of a trans Chinese-American and the rejection by the family and by gay activists at college is juxtaposed with the story of how Gutenberg invented movable type. The controversy of ethnic insensitivity at Google follows a chapter about a Mexican-American student who is attacked by fellow campus activists for not knowing Spanish.
These transitions are jarring. But the elegant prose and empathetic accounts of these struggling young people make Hyphen a worthwhile read. The growing diversity of the US will continue to be a significant topic in the future. Mahdavi's book, though brief, adds an important voice in the debate about our nation's demographic development.

My thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Academic for an advanced copy of this book.

A small book that poses many big questions, more than I expected about a book that I had thought was just a history of a grammatical mark. Part of the Object Lessons series, Hyphen by Pardis Mahdavi, is both a history of the hyphen, but also a history of how it has been used to marginalize and contain people who live in the United States. A mark meant to conjoin seems to have been adapted as a way of keeping people apart, I had no idea that Theodore Roosevelt himself wanted to rid the world of hyphenated Americans, saying that hyphens kept the divisions alive and pushed us apart.

At the same time the author tells of her own hyphenated life, and the difficulties growing up in America was and continues to be. People love to dymo label everything, so they don't have to think too much. Irish-American, African-American, it is just lazy, and gives a person an out. They aren't real Americans, see there is a modifier to their status. I don't have to treat them the same way.

This is just some of the questions raised in this little book. Far more interesting than I expected, and for a little mark, it does cause a lot of damage.

This was a super interesting, super fast read. It talks about both the history of the hyphen as a grammatical punctuation, but also it's usage in politics, and the personal experiences of those who have a hyphenated identity and how they live within that space. It talks about how the hyphen has been seen as a joining and as a dividing force. It was a fascinating read about this simple punctuation mark.

One of the greatest pleasures of reading the Object Lessons series (besides the wonderful cover design) is that you never know what to expect, as the eponymous objects are used as an inspiration for the author’s essay.

This time I’ve learned not only the curious history of hyphen but also realized for the first time how politically loaded this little punctuation mark is in the US. This is the main topic of this book, illustrated with stories from a few ‘hyphenated Americans’, including the author herself. Very relevant now, in the times of identity politics.

Thanks to the publisher, Bloomsbury Academic, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

I came into this expecting the focus to be on the historical background of the grammatical mark, so I was surprised that the bulk is interlocking creative non-fiction memoir. I enjoyed it, although sometimes it felt overdramatized. Still compelling, though. These fictionalized chapters contain the author's students and how their hyphenated identities impact their lives and families. I especially appreciated the author's personal account. I'd have like to read more about what happened to her.

My favorite parts were definitely the historical ones. Lots of shareable and intriguing not-so-distant revelations that really bring home that political arguments remain the same, and we must continue to push to keep from sliding back. These were told with a liveliness that engaged and intrigued. I read most of these out loud to other people, and that's the mark of great non-fiction - that need to share what you've learned.

I'd never realized that the anti-immigration rhetoric had centered on the actual hyphen itself. It's amazing how fast we forget our history.

Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Object Lessons books, being short, are good at responding. And whilst there is nothing here in Pardis Mahdavi's take on the hyphen that is ripped out of the last years headlines, it does come at a moment, and a moment when the idea of identity within the US is very much to the fore. There is some history of the hyphen - back to the Greek Aristarchus (of the asterisk), and the invention of the U-Hyphen - through Guttenberg's liberal and some say beautiful hyphen usage in his first bible. But the book takes the hyphen more politically and symbolically - as the modifier between Afro-American, Iranian-American and what these mixtures of identity means. In doing so it manages that really hard trick that the best Object Lesson do, telling a story, kicking about an idea and seasoning it with adequate historical trivia. Mahdavi tells the stories of three students she has worked with (suitably anonymised), and her own, relationship with the hyphen in their identity. For the author - and Iranian-American - it is not being American enough post 9/11, but being too American when presenting research in Tehran. Each story is ripe with allusions (they all make great stories in themselves), but all come to the same conclusion (perhaps as they were all in the same class taught by Mahdevi) - their identity is bound up in the hyphen itself.

What I really didn't know was quite how political the hyphen was in the US, going back to a Roosevelt speech demanding to get rid of the hyphen. Latterly echoed by John Wayne, the idea of - say - Italian-Americans meant they were always tied to the European country of origin. We are all Americans, drop that heritage - said a bunch of people in charge who had happily created their own identity and would use that against anyone else. This is not a book that is particularly about racism in that respect, rather than the intellectual backflips we do to create and defend these identities. A Mexican-American in one of the stories in told that - as she doesn't speak Spanish - she is not Mexican enough to politically represent the group. I recognise all of these arguments from my previous work, and hadn't seen the locus, or solution, in a hyphen. And it does read differently to a European - again this is a Bloomsbury book is coming from a very US perspective. Its not so much of a flaw here as it is by definition a non-mainstream US perspective, but it is interesting from a UK perspective where the common racialised terminology is often not hyphenated (Black British for example).

I found Hyphen an engaging and in some places surprisingly moving read, which nevertheless takes a simple piece of grammatical punctuation and interrogates a particular use of it. It does so playfully too, noting that the hyphen as a bridge is often there before compound words become full words. Whilst it does sit in a little bit of a University bubble, the stories in it do have meaning in the wider world and the conversation over what some think of as an ugly bit of grammatical convenience is fascinating. Not least in the enlightening Google techbro conversation about non-breaking hyphens - ie when not to have the hyphen split a line. You wouldn't do it in the middle of a phone number and you shouldn't do it for someone identity.

My first time reading a book from the Object Lessons series and I’m a bit confused. I thought entries were meant to be short histories and explorations of a specific object or concept, and as someone who is interested in punctuation marks a little too much, I was excited to request this as an ARC. But it wasn’t that, really.

‘Hyphen’ does discuss the history and usage of hyphens here and there, and the (short) chapters on that are pretty interesting, but ultimately it uses the hyphen as a starting point to jump into a fairly structureless (not in a negative way) exploration of issues of identity, race and ethnicity in a markedly American context through vignettes about different people.

The discussion was often interesting, even if the format was a very odd choice for me. The third-person narratives read very much like fiction. By that I don’t mean that they’re unbelievable, but that they’re presented with no context, using direct dialogue and in a third-person narrative without any obvious link to the author at first (later you find out how it’s all connected to her). Based on the author’s note and the acknowledgements, these stories seem to come from real people, but by presenting them in this format they lose a lot of nuance by needing to cram a lot of discussions and events that probably took place over months and years into a few short pages, often making them sound stilted and unnatural. I think a first-person account, reported speech or even interview format would have been more fitting in this type of non-fiction work. The chapters about the author’s own experience are significantly better for this reason. And I do think there was a real missed opportunity to explore, even in passing, how hyphens are used in other languages and countries referring to compound and mixed identities; it’s kind of implicitly presented as a universal phenomenon of written language when it’s very much not.

I really like the cover, and in a way it represents my issue with the expectations I had: the hyphen is presented as the central element, but it’s kind of a jumping board to discuss the author’s identity, that half-hidden ‘n’ and ‘A’ of her Iranian-American identity. That was pretty clever!

Maybe this is all my fault for misinterpreting the goal of the series, but I think my initial impression and expectations are the ones most people would have based on the way it’s marketed. Likewise, I’d imagine this might not even cross the radar of people who want to read about issues of compound identities because of how it’s presented. I might check out other books from the series to see if they follow that pattern or if this is a one-off.

As a book on hyphens, I would not recommend it; as a book exploring interesting identity issues, it’s good stuff, but very limited to an American context.

An interesting approach to providing understanding to complex situations.

This book weaves the stories of 'Hyphenated' individuals into the history of the hyphen itself, looking at the ways in which we describe things, and how we add typographic additional to visually separate, has an impact on peoples lives.

The author does a good job of providing insights on the lives of people who sit between the boundaries of different cultures for whom the hyphen becomes a distinguishing mark but these stories seemed quite disjointed from the part of the book that looked at the history of the hyphen itself. I would have liked more balanced, and a less jarring, transition between these two aspects.

In the end felt that the book tries to be both a semi-fictional story and provide non-fictional information without ever quite hitting either mark.

Pardis Mahdavi explores the linguistic foundation and cultural relevance of the hyphen through a researched and well-composed look at identity. A fascinating read, and a glimpse of how complex ideas are sometimes contained even in the what might seem to be the smallest grammatical choice.

An interesting collection of stories that tries to analyze how multitudes and various identities exist within an individual. I liked the use of the history of the hyphen to help explore how people carry within themselves a range of identities that may not even be obvious to themselves. Especially within American pop culture, we have a need to put everyone into perfect boxes and label them as a way to make sense of the human. Mahdavi tries to bring these social habits down and make humans more complicated.

Now that the whole world is connected, both online and offline, new questions arise. One of these questions is whether a hyphen connects or divides. Does it give you a positive or a negative feeling when your identity is described by a compound word with a hyphen?

Hyphen is a short and light read that reveals the richness and power of this single object. Beginning with the original use of this orthographic marker – following the Greeks, Romans, Celtic monks and Gutenberg – to the hot topic it became in the identity politics of the United States. From the point of view of four hyphenated Americans (e.g., Chinese-American), Pardis Mahdavi shares stories of belonging. What does it mean to belong to more than one country, race, gender, or religion? Is the hyphen used to include or exclude? Does it separate people and identities or bring them together?

Eye-opener
I liked how this book made me look beyond the use of the hyphen as an orthographic marker. It shows how such a seemingly small thing can have a big impact on people’s feelings. I have never been so aware of the use of hyphens while reading a text and I will never look at hyphens the same way again.

Divided audience
What I didn’t like about Hyphen is that the story is not balanced. It concentrates on one side of the story and presents it as correct. Yet there are more uses of the hyphen than to hyphenate people. At times, the hyphen seems like an afterthought rather than the subject of the book. The author focuses on the political and social power of the hyphen, with some side-steps into grammar and coding. The focus is on usage in the English-speaking world and politics in the United States. If I had to rewrite this book from the perspective of my language and country – or any other country – it would be completely different.

This makes me wonder what the intended audience of this book is; I am pretty sure I am not. I would have liked to read a more objective and balanced discussion. The emphasis is on how a hyphen divides and, in my opinion, the author fails to show the many great things it does when it connects. Where is the thoughtful discussion of other interpretations of the hyphen?

Hyphen-lover or -hater?
I am inclined to believe that a “hyphenated individual” who is unaware of the political discussions about the hyphen does not experience it as something bad. Hyphenated words often make me feel good because they suggest that the two elements are connected and work very well together. I guess I am a so-called hyphen-lover as I strongly believe in the connecting power of the hyphen: without the hyphen, words would represent only one part of a person, but with the hyphen, that person does not have to hide any part of him, her, or themselves.

This book weaves together the stories of various people who are struggling at the cross-sections of various aspects of their identities (whether in terms of race, nationality, culture, gender or sexuality) and sets it alongside the history of the hyphen.

Although at first that sounds like a somewhat bizarre concept, this book does a great job of bringing out the tensions in these identities, and how something as small as a hyphen can keep them together. We see how an Iranian-American woman navigates her Iranian identity once her Iranian passport is stripped from her, making her, legally, only American.

The history of the hyphen is interesting enough, especially given the passionate debates at various points in history where so-called ‘hyphenated Americans’ were seen as intrinsically harmful and dangerous to US nationhood, and everyone was expected to subsume their identity under the banner of ‘American’.

Bringing in the personal touches of the individual stories gave this book some real heart, helping to show how disparate identities have come to rely on what lies at the cross-sections to make sense of the various parts that make us up, and how the hyphen can act as a ‘bridge’ from one identity to another, strengthening both.

Although the last few chapters felt a bit cheesy for me, this book still brought up some interesting arguments in a concise and fascinating package.

I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Just in case it needs repeating, the series this book belongs to is concerned with producing a specific kind of non-fiction read, with a subject every time that you would never expect to find yourself reading about, and an approach that quite often is too personal and self-reflective for you to ever think it a success as an academic volume. Hence here I got the history of the hyphen, and em don't we all dash to those?! - but also potted biographies of the author and several people who found themselves a hyphenated American, to use the words of folk such as that great social commentator John Wayne, and who found themselves between a rock and a hard place and needed a balancing beam to call home in between.

And my response to these pages was ever balancing itself, too, swinging from just stating the proof here that there is not enough in the story of the hyphen to justify a fully bound book, to the thought that this isn't about the hyphen anyway. It's about race, and sex changes, and those clearly are subjects we've had many a chance to read about before now. Hyphens aren't, and all the personal stuff could have been in one chapter to introduce us to the idea of hyphenated people (a term unknown to me at least, here in the UK). Instead it's the majority of the book, and as a result I felt short-changed.

And of course the specific kind of non-fiction I talked of earlier is definitely a left-wing kind. This series seems at times intent on drumming all conservatism out of published academe. And it's never really to the ultimate good. Someone here, we are told, "identified as white and American". Yeah, snide voice, that's probably because he was. This bastardisation of the language, in a book that mentions the word orthography more than any I have ever read, and so should know much better, shows how pointless it is when this kind of woke exactitude is evoked. It's just not good enough, and neither are the multiple instances of fictionalised conversation and detail in the biographical sections.

I was right in my earlier assumptions, that there is one of the more surprisingly readable dissertation-length essays about the hyphen to be had, and little more. What we did have that was about grammar I loved – the way New-York was almost legally forced to abandon its own stabilising centre-line; how usage changes over the decades and centuries, so that eventually, if we all live long enough, my friends will be able to play "sealion" against me in Scrabble and not get challenged. The rest you can keep.