Ferrara capably conveys the sensory magic of writing: sound made visible and tangible.
A scholar of archaeology and linguistics leads us on “an uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research, and the faint, fleeting echo of writing’s future.”
Deftly translated by Portnowitz, Ferrara’s book is more than a cook’s tour of the history, present, and future of writing. It’s so dense and detailed it could also serve as an academic text. “Writing is an entire world to be discovered, but it is also a filter through which to observe…our world: language, art, biology, geometry, psychology, intuition, logic,” writes Ferrara, a professor in the department of classical philology and Italian studies at the University of Bologna. She argues that the invention of writing as a complete and structured system derived from a series of gradual, cumulative, coordinated actions (and luck)—a cultural product, not an innate skill. Ferrara explores the creation of scripts (some yet to be deciphered) in China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Crete, Easter Island, Cyprus, and Mesoamerica, beginning with their origins as images, icons, and logograms. She reveals the enduring power of the alphabet and how learning to write and read are physically mind-altering, and she investigates why writing, a useful technology, if not a necessity, came about. The author offers fascinating historical accounts, observations (especially on today’s retro embrace of iconography), and deductions (at heart, the book is a detective story). She is thorough, perhaps to a fault. General readers may find the text too heavy on technical analysis. By contrast, Ferrara occasionally takes off on flights of giddy romanticism, though the scientist usually regains control. Her expertise and enthusiasm compensate for some of the pop-culture diversions, unbridled conjectures, and a few debatable assertions—e.g., “Collaboration is at the root of every modicum of progress ever gained”; “Art is not something that can be deciphered. It simply is.” Nonetheless, the author knows when to eschew overly definitive statements when it comes to the intersections of writing and language.
Ferrara capably conveys the sensory magic of writing: sound made visible and tangible.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60162-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
HISTORY | ANCIENT | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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