A four-millennia trajectory that nearly overwhelms with its incremental magnitude.
British calligrapher Clayton (Arts, Design and Media/Univ. of Sunderland) embarks on an enormous undertaking: the history of the written word.
From Egypt circa 1850 B.C. to Xerox PARC in California, where the author lent his typographical expertise in the early days of the computer, Clayton’s narrative is necessarily both mind-numbingly specific and vastly general. Moreover, he mostly ignores all but the Greco-Roman tradition from which our own writing descends, devoting very little space to early printing in China and Korea. As a calligrapher, Clayton waxes rapturously on the craft of writing and how cultural shifts have informed the “concept of an alphabet as an interrelated system of proportional forms.” This proceeded from the era of the Greeks’ trading with Phoenician cities, when they adapted their writing from syllabic to the latter’s simpler alphabet. Eventually, Greek “monoline” (all letters having the same thickness) dovetailed into Roman inscription, which used fuller, more sophisticated forms. Everyday writing emerged from official documents, giving way to quicker, cursive scripts and rounder uncials, the precursor to lowercasing. Clayton emphasizes the importance of literacy to the rich periods of writing development—e.g., in the A.D. fourth century, citizens of Rome enjoyed a wide variety of libraries; the early Christian monks and scholars like Eusebius created a new method of book production; Charlemagne instituted a new era of administrative discipline in which the influential “Carolingian minuscule” was adopted; and Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press helped spur the Protestant Reformation. Hand in hand with the evolution of writing went paper and quill pens, and Clayton spills plenty of ink over these devices. He dwells fondly on the craftsmen who created the gorgeous fonts that bear their names and how periods of rich letter writing gave way to the ascendancy of newspapers, advertising and the “mechanical interventions” of the Industrial Revolution. However, even as the digital age took off, the computer continued to require elegant topography.
A four-millennia trajectory that nearly overwhelms with its incremental magnitude.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-242-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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 Yorker staff 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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
