A short and, until the last chapter, confusing book (though clearly written, but confusing in message and objective) by a widely read professor at FIU. Fish contends that the form is as important as the content in a great sentence, which is a logical system or sequence to understand the world.  After many pages, he divides sentences into two groups:  the  subordinating or hypotaxis (i.e. rank, order, sequence, function) and additive or parataxis (i.e. random, disorderly, stream of consciousness) and the authors who personify those styles:James, Austen, Pater, Milton Swift, and MLK for the former and Woolf, Montaigne, Stein, Salinger, and Hemingway for the latter.  The actual purpose of the book only became clear in the final chapter where Fish reveals that it is death, mortality, the finitude of time which leads to the importance of sentences.  Drawing upon Conrad, Ford Maddox Ford, and Anthony Powell as well as John Dunne, he points out that “It is the inevitability and shadow of death that provides life with its narrative arc and provides moments of meaning in that narrative.  Its distinctiveness is a function of place prepared for it by its past and the place waiting for it in a future that has a terminal point..Without the specter and period of death, there would be no urgency of accomplishment, no expectations to be realized or disappointed; no anxieties to be allayed…Significance would not be in the process of emerging.”  Lots of wonderful literary allusions to enjoy.  Two fun specific linkages were his discussion of Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy which tied to my recent visit to Kensal Green Cemetery where Sterne is buried and where I also found Thackeray and Trollope (Pinter and Terence Ratigan are also buried there.). There was also a discussion of Gertrude Stein’s American lectures in which she declared her love of diagraming sentences, a topic in a recent Best American Essays volume.