Garfield’s great affection for his subject shines through, making this book a pleasing, intriguing read.
A wealth of research wrapped into an eccentric, charming package.
Garfield is the author of several appealingly unusual books, such as Mauve, about the history of purple, and Just My Type, about the history of fonts. His latest fits easily into this unpredictable canon, combining information, entertainment, and insight. Garfield is clearly an aficionado, and he takes us into his ever growing collection. In tracking the history of encyclopedias, the author maintains focus on the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the longtime gold standard. Launched in 1768, it mixed material from existing sources with original articles from the editors. Later editions also used specialized contributors. “In 1926,” writes Garfield, “George Bernard Shaw received $68.50 for his article on Socialism, while Albert Einstein received $86.40 for his piece on Space-Time.” However, notes the author, the Britannica was far from the first attempt to consolidate all knowledge. Of course, the ancient Greeks and Romans took several shots at the project, but for sheer scale, the winner is the Yongle Dadian, which was commissioned by Zhu Di, an emperor of the Ming dynasty in China. It had 11,095 manuscript volumes, so large that there was only one copy made. Garfield has a good time exploring the evolution of the encyclopedia. “What is and isn’t valued knowledge, and how best to present it, has been the recurring headache of every encyclopedia editor in history,” he writes. The author peppers the text with peculiar entries from various volumes. Despite his droll sense of humor, he consistently makes important points about the fungible nature of knowledge and the way that language changes to reflect social trends. Hard-copy encyclopedias were eventually replaced, first with searchable CDs and, eventually, Wikipedia and other digital resources. In fact, Wikipedia “plundered huge amounts of Britannica’s (out-of-copyright) eleventh edition as its core knowledge base,” writes the author. Even as paper volumes approach extinction, their legacy endures.
Garfield’s great affection for his subject shines through, making this book a pleasing, intriguing read.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780063292277
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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
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
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