Review of New Approaches to Hedging

Review by Ronald Rona-Ramalita
University of Upper Uppsala, Utah

Gunther Kaltenböck, Wiltrud Mihatsch, and Stefan Schneider, eds. 2010. New Approaches to Hedging. Brill.

New Approaches to Hedging (NAH) is sort of a rather longish book, about 328 pages more or less. Well, maybe that’s kind of short as academic books run, now that I think about it. The authors (or maybe it’s the editors) make a tolerable lot of claims, some of which I didn’t totally understand, but at least I did read all of them, I think. I mean, it’s possible that I zoned out and missed a claim or two here and there, but I’m pretty sure I read nearly every page, and some of them most likely more than once.

I would have thought that NAH was so old that there couldn’t be any new ways to approach it, but there you go, it turns out that this book thought up a bunch more ways (at least several, anyway) that I don’t remember hearing of, not that that means I never did, because I could easily have forgotten if I had heard of them.

If you ask me (which at least the editor of this journal did, and maybe some of its readers are doing so now, too), NAH is not a bad book on the whole. Sure, it’s not perfect—nothing is you know—but it’s got way more things going for it than some of the pseudo-intellectual stuff we read back in grad school.

NAH is a discoursy sort of a book. You may not know what I mean by that—I’m not sure I know myself sometimes—but it’s like when you almost can’t remember what you learned in Syntax class, but then you almost can remember at the same time, and so your analysis ends up with terms that sound a lot like syntax as interpreted by an English major, and tree diagrams that are nearly Chomskyan but lacking something or other that might have made them a bit more sciency (at least, enough that they could have fooled the English major) and at the same time the nodes are almost all sentences and paragraphs instead of syntactic categories and the like, and finally you write a paper-like something that might be publishable if you choose a nearly-but-not-quite linguistics journal, and you’re done.

So on the whole, I pretty much would recommend NAH for anybody who might have even the slightest sense of interest in this kind of topic, no matter what they think this kind of topic is.

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