The subtitle partly explains the purpose of this compilation, which is principally designed to help writers avoid solecisms when bringing characters from unfamiliar cultures into their fictions. It could be used as a guide to etiquette in real‐life situations as well, but is probably not the sort of thing you would want to lug around to cocktail parties on the diplomatic circuit. In her introduction the author goes into some detail about the various kinds of name (her terminology is a bit unorthodox), and offers useful advice about euphony, avoiding too much alliteration and rhythmic repetition, about taking care in historical fiction not to give characters names that were not used until after the period chosen, and such.
The main body of the text is an area‐by‐area, then country‐by‐country series of lists of female, male and family names with a few notes about the peculiarities of each set. My confidence in her authority when discussing relatively unfamiliar cultures was undermined by some oddities in those nearer home. She says that Paul is relatively uncommon, for example, though there must be millions of us, and Peters and Daniels; some fairly common Scottish, Irish and Welsh names are not listed (Law, Lynch, Davies); Ahern is Irish not Welsh; and Scottish names are grouped unhelpfully under each clan.
Some of the French names are given a phonetic guide to their pronunciation (not always correct), but none of the German or some other western European names which can be just as elusive. It is helpful of her, though, to give the feminine forms of Slavonic and Baltic patronymics and surnames, and to explain that Hungarians and Chinese put their surnames before their personal names. Coverage is impressively worldwide, including various Asian linguistic groups and cultures, Pacific, Latin American, African and native North American.
In a separate section, and mindful of her introductory warning about anachronisms, she assigns particular names to historical periods and places and giving, as sometimes elsewhere, an idea of the meaning of names, even though meanings apparently were, indeed still are, unimportant so that all sorts of curious combinations and discrepancies occur. There is a reasonably good bibliography and a rather poor index. In view of the coverage and the originality of the idea, I would recommend this book for medium‐sized and specialist collections despite sundry oddities in it: treat with caution.
