Period Piece

You can set aside concerns about such minor matters as sex, money and career. Lynne Truss is here to help you with the really important issues such as the proper placement of apostrophes, the six uses of the comma and the preservation of the hyphen. Truss, a British journalist and novelist, is a self-proclaimed stickler for punctuation. Not for its own sake, mind you, but because, as she writes in Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Gotham Books; 209 pages), "without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning."

Too eager to keep Eats breezy, Truss writes in a tiresomely jokey style. But her book teems with amusing and appalling examples of mangled punctuation (starting with her title, which comes from a gag about a zoology entry on the panda), offers a lot of clear and helpful advice, and takes delightful detours into history. Example: her paean to Aldus Manutius the Elder, the 15th century Venetian printer who invented italics and first used the semicolon and whose babies, says Truss, she wishes she could have had.

Is all this enough to explain Eats' astonishing six-month run atop best-seller lists in Britain and now its ascension onto several in the U.S.? Not quite. What gives the book its oomph is that behind Truss's larky manner, she's a fiery vigilante. If you can't learn the difference between the possessive its and the contraction it's, she writes, "you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave." Just kidding? Don't be too sure.