Wednesday, May 22, 2013. Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow launched their latest book The Story of Spanish with the help of the Embassy of Spain in Washington. The sold-out event was a success and Nadeau & Barlow were joined by Felix Sánchez (left), Chairman and Co-founder of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts, as well as Guillermo Corral (right), the embassy’s Cultural Attaché, for a lively discussion on the new book.

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Our first newspaper review in The Wall Street Journal, by the paper’s former Latin American correspondent, Joel Millman, came out recently. He praises the book as “part linguistic primer, part cultural history,” and calls The Story of Spanish “entertaining,” and says it “zips along crisply.”

But strangely, he criticizes us for writing more about “Spanish speakers”  than about Spanish. Curious, since the point of the book is to explain how Spanish grew and spread. It’s hard to imagine how that could have happened without the people who spoke it.
Read the review »

Interviewed in the May 3 issue of Shelf-Awareness, Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau talk about some of the discoveries they made when they were researching and writing The Story of Spanish. Shelf-Awareness calls the book “an engaging mix of travel, personal anecdotes and extensive research.”

Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau live together, work together and, between the two of them, have published six books (including Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong and The Story of French) and more than 1,000 magazine articles, and have won multiple awards in journalism. Their new book, The Story of Spanish (St. Martin’s Press), is a history of Spanish from its roots as an obscure dialect confined to a remote group of farmers in northern Spain to a language spoken by 450 million people in 22 countries. Read more »

Pop history of the evolution of the Spanish language and its spread through conquest, commerce and culture.
Read the review »