As long as the "Perplexed" audience are still good at reading mildly academic texts, they'll get through this. We just need to face that Labov's work was rather complex and explaining it to somebody without making sure they understand XYZ first is kind of impossible. Still a heroic attempt to make Labov accessible.

A valuable and clarifying guide to one of the most interesting figures in modern linguistics.

Like all my reviews, I'll preface by saying this is not a professional review by any means, but represents my own biased, subjective opinions.

I saw this on the shelf at by library randomly and it looked interesting. It's not a biography of Labov per se, sort of an overview of him and his work. This book was great. As a grad student in linguistics, I'm familiar with several things that Labov has done, but there was so much more that I didn't even realize was his. Things like hypercorrection and the observer's effect, which I feel like aren't even linguisticky terms. It's pretty amazing how much of his work touches every aspect of linguistics.

What I like about the beginning of the book was that it set the stage for what the field of linguistics was like before Labov came along. Dialectology was a thing, but variation was seen as a thing to overcome rather than something to study.

The following are my notes I took as I read along the book. Again, brief, biased summaries:

• Chapter 1: The Challenges of Labov—I read this but didn't take notes. Sorry.
• Chapter 2: Linguistics and sociolinguistics before Labov—If nothing else, this was a great a chapter on the history of sociolinguistics. It covers everything that's happened since the 1800s and leads it up to the 1960s and the problems that researchers were facing. There were methodological problems, and just conceptual things that weren't brought to light back then, which this chapter highlighted.
• Chapter 3: How to establish a field as a graduate student—This was a summary of the Martha's Vineyard study and the New York study, with commentary along the way of how the methodology was new. Apparently, Labov came up with the convention of using parentheses for sociolinguistic variables, slashes for phonemes, and brackets for phonetic realizations. He also came up with the idea of hypercorrection, based on his New York study. Also, there's a lot more to the study in New York than just the Fourth Floor part. And it was interesting to read.
• Chapter 4: A Variationist approach to language—Covered broadly what variationist sociolinguistics is.
• Chapter 5: Speech Styles and Discourse—This talked a lot about the sociolinguistic interview and why it was used to much to elicit informal speech. There have been criticisms though, and they are explained, with defense.
• Chapter 6: The "socio" of sociolinguistics—Talked about the key sociolinguistic variables that Labov and others have used, the problems with quantifying them, and general conclusions that have been made from Labov's work. Talked specifically about social class, gender, and ethnicity.
• Chapter 7: Labov as a historical linguist—This chapter talked about tracking sound changes over time and how Labov did it. It talks about push and pull chains and in general change across time.
• Chapter 8: African American English—This chapter was all about AAVE and what Labov has done with it. It gave some pretty racist pre-Labovian quotes from back in the day, and then some better ones that Labov did. It also told the story of Ann Arbor and Oakland, which was good to read. It ended with the fact that things are better generally today, but not that much better.
• Chapter 9: 50 years—Gave an overview of what the field of sociolinguistics looks like today. Talked about sociophonetics, corpus linguistics, and Eckert's waves. While not all fields of linguistics care about social factors (theoretical linguistics, for example), compared to 50 years ago, pretty much every one else is forced to acknowledge social factors in language now.

I'd recommend this book to any student of linguistics, and especially if they are interested in sociolinguistics or a similar subdiscipline. I thought it was great