Stimulating and witty—intellectual entertainment at its best.
An intelligent, provocative history of institutions that preserve and disseminate information.
McNeely and Wolverton (History/Univ. of Oregon) discuss six, beginning with the library. The great library founded in Alexandria, Egypt, in the third century BCE was actually a break with tradition, they note. Ancient Greek society was based on oral traditions, and not everyone was in favor of collecting written knowledge. Books are untrustworthy, Socrates insisted, because their contents are detached from the actions, honor and character of whoever wrote them. He wasn’t entirely wrong, the authors maintain. Readers often grant undeserved authority to the written word, and even today nonsense competes with wisdom in all assemblies of information, the Internet most of all. On the other hand, writing is durable, so libraries caught on. In chronological order, the narrative moves on to the monastery, the university, the Republic of Letters, the disciplines and the laboratory. While other writers extol monasteries for preserving ancient texts during the Dark Ages, McNeely and Wolverton point out that monks devoted almost all their copying to Christian documents; the Islamic culture that arose after 600 CE did a better job of preserving ancient classics. The first universities, products of increasing prosperity in the 12th century, were simply urban collections of scholars and students; hundreds of years passed before construction produced the great institutions that remain today. Universities combined with moveable type and the Renaissance after 1450 to produce the Republic of Letters, an explosion of humanist thinkers who exchanged information throughout Europe in their common language, Latin. So much knowledge had accumulated by the 18th century that serious academics had to specialize and hence, the disciplines appeared. Throughout history, educated men studied what was already known; the Enlightenment launched a revolution with writers and scientists who took an interest in new knowledge. Laboratories produced a trickle then an avalanche of technical breakthroughs accompanied by a mass of information and information technology that today threatens to overwhelm us.
Stimulating and witty—intellectual entertainment at its best.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06506-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
A superficial, unreliable profile of the PLO's often articulate, photogenic spokesperson during part of the Intifada, and particularly during the Madrid and Washington negotiations with Israel (199193). Victor, a novelist as well as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, maintains near the beginning of her book that Hanan Ashrawi ``was the one person who had made possible [Yasir] Arafat's presence'' on the White House lawn on Sept. 13, 1993, when his famous ``handshake'' with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin took place. Not only does she not make a case for this extraordinary claim, but Victor demonstrates how, throughout most of 1993, the PLO leader kept Ashrawi ``in the dark'' about the secret Oslo negotiations. Her book also is riddled with the kind of errors that make one question her knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For example, Victor twice claims that the 1917 Balfour Declaration was issued in 1921; the second time, she asserts that it ``provided for two states, Israel and Palestine, to exist side by side.'' Nonsense: The declaration made no reference to any ``state,'' only to Great Britain supporting the establishment of a ``Jewish homeland'' in Palestine, which was soon to be a British mandate. Equally irritating are Victor's stylistic excesses, her use of the kind of hyperbolic prose found in ``puff'' pieces, such as her assertion that Ashrawi's ``razor-sharp responses captured world opinion every time that she faced a camera.'' Earlier this year, Ashrawi resigned from the PLO leadership to establish and head an independent Palestinian human rights monitoring group. It is this, not the media glitz she enjoyed as a PLO spokesperson, that may lend her career its real significance. Until we know whether and how Hanan Ashrawi will contribute to the humanitarian nature of a possible Palestinian state, any biography of her, particularly one as lacking in historical and biographical depth as Victor's, is premature.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-103968-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
A convincing reassessment of Lyndon Johnson's foreign policy. Although Brands (History/Texas A&M; The Devil We Knew, 1993, etc.) admits that it is difficult to consider LBJ's record in foreign affairs without immediately thinking of the debacle in Vietnam that wrecked his presidency, that is nonetheless what he attempts to do. Coming to the Oval Office at the height of the American Century, Johnson inherited a tradition of American globalism that began with the Spanish-American War, gained momentum in WW I, and peaked after WW II, from which the United States emerged as the greatest economic and military force in the world, able to project its power around the planet. The author argues that Johnson continued in this vein and that many of his accomplishments deserve to be understood and applauded. Obsessed with Communism and the nagging question of ``Who lost Cuba,'' Johnson intervened in Vietnam and successfully invaded the Dominican Republic, ostensibly to protect American lives but in reality to prevent a supposed Communist takeover. When the Six-Day War broke out in the Middle East, Johnson could not, as Eisenhower did in the Suez crisis of 1956, force Israel to give up territory gained. He did, however, use America's coercive influence to limit the scope and duration of the war. He suffered the snub of de Gaulle ordering US troops out of France and withdrawing from NATO, but soldiers remained in Europe and he kept the alliance together. He helped halt wars between Greece and Turkey and between India and Pakistan. In many ways, Brands offers Johnson as a transitional figure between the days of American hegemony and the current era when a multipolar world often seems to confound and stymie US foreign policy. Judicious and well researched, the volume presents a good opening in the reappraisal of Johnson and his administration.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-507888-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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