Guten­berg how one man remade the world with wordsJohn Man.
John Wiley & Sons 2002World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

That Johann Guten­berg invented the mov­able type print­ing press is com­mon knowl­edge. But beyond this sim­ple fact, not much is usu­ally men­tioned about the man. There was cer­tainly not much more infor­ma­tion pro­vided in any of my his­tory classes.

John Man does a won­der­ful job of giv­ing us not only Gutenberg’s back­ground, but also that of the var­i­ous tech­nolo­gies involved in mak­ing mov­able type prac­ti­cal. The reader is also pro­vided with the socio-historic con­text that made such an inven­tion pos­si­ble. Along­side this are exam­ples of why the tech­nol­ogy was not devel­oped ear­lier else­where — reli­gious pro­hi­bi­tions; non-alphabetic writ­ing sys­tems; lack of grapes, olives, or other rea­sons for pre-existing press tech­nol­ogy. Man does a good job of dis­pelling the notion of the dei­fied inven­tor, at least in this par­tic­u­lar case: Gutenberg’s motives had much more to do with gold than with God. Writ­ten more in a lec­ture style than stan­dard schol­arly prose, this was a quick, infor­ma­tive, and sat­is­fy­ing read.

High tide in Tuc­son essays from now or neverBar­bara King­solver
Harper­Collins Pub­lish­ers 1995World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

In this col­lec­tion of essays, King­solver dives into a diverse set of top­ics. Her writ­ings range from humer­ous mus­ings on the bio­rhythms of a stow­away her­mit crab to exas­per­a­tion at the Amer­i­can de-humanizing of the effects of war. The bril­liance of her writ­ing is evi­dent through­out, var­i­ously man­i­fest as wit, beauty, and poignancy. King­solver is best known as a nov­el­ist; I must add her works of fic­tion to my read­ing list.

Colum­bus Was Last From 200,000 BC to 1492, A Hereti­cal His­tory of Who Was FirstPatrick Huyghe
Anom­al­ist Books 2005World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

In the first few chap­ters, it became evi­dent that Mr. Huyghe really wants to believe the­o­ries built on very sparse or ques­tion­able evi­dence. A look at his pre­vi­ous writ­ings (which are not listed in this vol­ume) reveals books about sea mon­sters, UFOs, and bigfoot-type crea­tures — which sheds some light on what he con­sid­ers cred­i­ble infor­ma­tion. To Huyghe’s credit, he does often present oppos­ing view­points. How­ever, he doesn’t con­sider every­thing, and is obvi­ously biased towards the more spec­tac­u­lar and less cred­i­ble theories.

The best chap­ter of this book, in my opin­ion, is the last. Here, Hughye points out that accounts of Columbus’s voy­ages con­tain many incon­sis­ten­cies, con­tra­dic­tions, and omis­sions — the very things that cast doubt on accounts of other voy­ages. While this doesn’t prove that other accounts are true, it shows the impor­tance of third-party reports and inde­pen­dant ver­i­fi­ca­tion. If these existed for oth­ers, like St. Bren­dan, their tales might be far more believ­able. Huyghe’s point that Colum­bus should be known as the first con­questor of Amer­ica rather than its dis­cov­erer is a good one. We know defin­i­tively that other Euro­peans (the Norse) had been here hun­dreds of years before, and immi­grants from Asia (Native Amer­i­cans) had already been here for thou­sands of years.

The pres­ence of so much evi­dence for other vis­its to Amer­ica, albiet often sparse and incon­clu­sive, makes it seem likely that at least some of it is valid. Huyghe shoots him­self in the foot by putting too much stock in the most far-fetched the­o­ries. Had he pre­sented all the same data, yet remained on the skep­ti­cal side of the fence, my opin­ion of this book would be much higher.

See also my rant about this book.

What Went Wrong West­ern Impact and Mid­dle East­ern ResponseBernard Lewis
Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, USA 2001World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

An illu­mi­nat­ing look at the his­tory of the Islamic world’s rela­tions with other cul­tures. It exam­ines how at first the flow of knowl­edge and tech­nol­ogy went from the Islamic world to the West, then began to reverse direc­tion around the Renais­sance. Lewis man­ages to be intel­lec­tual and pithy while keep­ing his prose extremely readable.

Dia­mond The His­tory of a Cold-Blooded Love AffairMatthew Hart
Plume 2002World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Not exactly what I expected. “Recent” should have directly pre­ceeded “His­tory” in the title. Lit­tle men­tion is made of dia­monds in antiq­uity, or even prior to the 19^th cen­tury. Inter­est­ing for what it is, if a bit ram­bling at times.

Update: The title that Ama­zon has (“Heart of an Obses­sion”) isn’t actu­ally printed on the book any­where. The book itself uses the “Cold-Blooded Love Affair” title I used in the title of this entry.

Ver­ba­tim From the bawdy to the sub­lime, the best writ­ing on lan­guage for word lovers, gram­mar mavens, and arm­chair lin­guistsErin McK­ean
Har­vest Books 2001World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

A very inter­est­ing and enter­tain­ing col­lec­tion of arti­cles on lin­guis­tics, ety­mol­ogy, and gen­eral logophilia. The writ­ings range from seri­ous anthro­pol­ogy to wacky word­play. This book actu­ally made me laugh out loud on a num­ber of occasions.