Lingo, by Gaston Dorren, is a good book that'll hold the interest of a language lover and/or hobbyist, but don't expect depth here. Pick something interesting about many languages (60) and write a short chapter about it. That's what Dorren has done in Lingo. My issues are these:
Ossetian, the one member of the Iranian branch present in Europe (by way of Russia), is covered over three pages of text. He discusses where Ossetian can be found in the first paragraph. Along with a list of languages found in Russia beginning with just those that start with T. Then K. All of that in chapter number one. Then nothing at all about Ossetian until the last paragraph. And, you guessed it, the only thing apparently of interest with the language is that it is the only member of the 10th branch of the Indo-European tree (Iranian languages) found in Europe. Whoopie-doo.
His chapter on a "much-needed merger" was silly and a waste of a chapter. Why try and convince the reader that Slavic languages are hard thus let's merge two of them into a horribly named Slogarian? What's the use, when this chapter could have covered another European oddity, or even another Slavic language if he so chose? For the first category I'd recommend Meadow Mari, spoken in Russia between the Vyatka river and the Urals, thus officially in Europe. It's Finno-Ugric, so unlike most of Europe's languages. Or for the latter category how about Rusyn, the not-just-a-dialect-of-Ukrainian language of over half a million?
Despite these issues of mine, the book was engaging. Just don't expect depth in any of the 60 chapters.
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