Before discussing this book, let’s take a short detour into the nuances of grammar. I promise this is going somewhere. In English, there is an important difference between “a,” an indefinite article, and “the,” which is definite. “A giraffe” could refer to any of the long-necked, spotted animals, while “the giraffe” indicates a specific one. When you stack together multiple articles and nouns, the shades of meaning can get murkier. In essayist Janet Malcolm’s famous takedown