Quirky facts enliven a brisk story of the history of handwriting.
A succinct overview of written communication.
Belt magazine editor-in-chief Trubek (A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses, 2010) turns from house museums of famous writers to the act of writing itself, tracing its history from cuneiform to digital messages. Observing a second-grader practicing penmanship in school, she remarks, “the prospect of not teaching students handwriting strikes many as unimaginable.” However, notes the author optimistically, “new technologies do not kill off previous ones. Writing did not kill speech, but speaking took on new valences as writing came to compete with it.” Readers may wonder at the idea that speaking is a technology and also at Trubek’s easy acceptance of Socrates’ notion that writing “caused humans to become less intelligent, less civilized, and less creative” and “decreases the human capacity to remember, to mentally retain and file facts, ideas, and experiences for later recall.” She gives no supporting evidence for these assertions. Despite privileging orality, the Greeks invented the first alphabet to contain both consonants and vowels and wrote by running words together in unpunctuated paragraphs. The Romans created the letters we now use and invented books. Medieval scribes, usually from poor families, labored intensely to produce multiple copies of religious tracts. Gradually, secular scribes created books for schools and universities, traveling across Europe selling their services. Trubek discovered that handwriting varied dramatically from region to region, making it difficult for contemporary scholars to read manuscripts. The field of paleography emerged, with specialists trained to decipher different scripts. After the invention of the printing press, many former scribes became successful penmanship masters. In the 19th century, A.N. Palmer invented “an efficient, simple style” widely taught in schools. Typewriters’ idiosyncratic letter arrangement was designed to prevent type bars from sticking together when struck sequentially. Although keyboarding competes with handwriting, Trubek believes that change offers opportunities “in accessibility, in democratization…that should be celebrated.”
Quirky facts enliven a brisk story of the history of handwriting.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62040-215-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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