About his earlier work " Spoken Here is a splendid, original work, written with a combination of the scholarly and the personal, the anecdotal and the researched, in voices that celebrate words and create pictures . Abley's point, persuasively and vibrantly made, is that we are all weakened by threads dropped from the tapestry of international languages and cultures." The Globe and Mail "Gracefully written, funny and frequently heartbreaking." The New York Times Book Review "Gorgeous and lyrical . Strange Bewildering Time is . a meditation on the nature of memory, time and self-knowledge, as well as an account of a region on the brink of turmoil . There is poetry on every page." Montreal Review of Books.