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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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