I was prepared to love Allison Jones’ Best Exotic Baby Names. It’s tough to find an authoritative resource for names from other cultures, and it’s even more difficult to find truly interesting names that work well in American English. As I pre-ordered the book on Amazon, I had high hopes that I’d find [...]

If you’re a namenik, you may well recall what baby name books looked like before Pamela Redmond Satran and Linda Rosenkrantz hit the scene: plodding lists in alphabetical order, with descriptions, origins, nicknames and possibly a note about a famous bearer or two. But for the most part, Abelia and Amanda were treated equally.
Then [...]