History of Books Books

The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

A. J. Jacobs

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Total reviews: 222 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

33,000 PAGES

44 MILLION WORDS

10 BILLION YEARS OF HISTORY

1 OBSESSED MAN

Part memoir and part education (or lack thereof), The Know-It-All chronicles NPR contributor A.J. Jacobs's hilarious, enlightening, and seemingly impossible quest to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica from A to Z.

To fill the ever-widening gaps in his Ivy League education, A.J. Jacobs sets for himself the daunting task of reading all thirty-two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His wife, Julie, tells him it's a waste of time, his friends believe he is losing his mind, and his father, a brilliant attorney who had once attempted the same feat and quit somewhere around Borneo, is encouraging but unconvinced.

With self-deprecating wit and a disarming frankness, The Know-It-All recounts the unexpected and comically disruptive effects Operation Encyclopedia has on every part of Jacobs's life -- from his newly minted marriage to his complicated relationship with his father and the rest of his charmingly eccentric New York family to his day job as an editor at Esquire. Jacobs's project tests the outer limits of his stamina and forces him to explore the real meaning of intelligence as he endeavors to join Mensa, win a spot on Jeopardy!, and absorb 33,000 pages of learning. On his journey he stumbles upon some of the strangest, funniest, and most profound facts about every topic under the sun, all while battling fatigue, ridicule, and the paralyzing fear that attends his first real-life responsibility -- the impending birth of his first child.

The Know-It-All is an ingenious, mightily entertaining memoir of one man's intellect, neuroses, and obsessions, and a struggle between the all-consuming quest for factual knowledge and the undeniable gift of hard-won wisdom.

The Tao of Pooh

Benjamin Hoff

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Total reviews: 217 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Not very taoist 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I gave this book 3 stars because it reads easily enough, there are some insightful moments, and because it is fairly enjoyable with the exchange between the author and Pooh bear. But, this book is not recommended for anyone wanting to understand taoism. Much of the book contains almost bitter western bashing, or the condemning of certain modes of life, which does not actually help to reinforce taoist concepts. There are portions that read more like rants, even.

Pooh vs. Confucius. 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I'm right to review this book for two reasons, and wrong for one. First, AA Milne was the first book I remember looking for in the school library, as a child. My "inner child" (which is mostly in control of the outer adult, anyway) rejoiced in an excuse to revisit 100 Acre Wood. Second, as a missionary in China (and later author of a book on "How Jesus fulfills the Chinese Culture"), I also learned to love Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi, and learn from them. Third, however, while as Hoff correctly points out, there's a little of each these characters in each of us, the owl usually emerges in me when I start critiquing books.

By and large, this is a pleasant and successful introduction to philosophical Taoism. Sometimes it's confusing which are the bits Pooh said in Milne, and which are the bits Hoff added -- even though the font is different -- but then, Hoff's Pooh sometimes sounds quite different from Milne's Pooh. Sometimes he even comes across as overly clever, which is not in character.

When I asked young people in China, I found that more seemed to admire Confucius than Lao Zi. Let me devote the rest of my review to explaining that, in light of Hoff's depiction of both.

If Pooh disses Owl, you can't blame him because (1) He's a stuffed animal; (2) It's funny; and (3) Hoff is critiquing archeotypes, not individuals. When Zhuang Zi disses Confucius, the second two excuses also apply: there's a bit of sectarian edge, but it's more Saturday Night Live than Inquisition. When Hoff steps out of character to diss "dissicated" intellectual types, there's a bit of humor, but it's harder to draw the line between fair critique and cheap shot.

The truth is, lots of "owls" are reasonable people. Confucius was one: he loved music, took disciples hiking, and admitted when he didn't know something. And lots of "Poohs" can't tell their heads from the hole in a honey jar, making them not cute and wise, but common, ignorant gluttons.

But this is a critique of Taoism in general, not just Hoff, and certainly not Pooh. This is why Taoism was never "the Way" in China. There was a reaction, often a healthy one, to the Lao-Zhuang philosophy. It's the weakness of early Taoist philosophy -- reflected by Hoff's over-generalizations and over-simplicities -- that it did not make the difference clear. Folk Taoism ran off in one diametrically different direction -- as Hoff appears not to know, but probably does -- and Buddhists and Confucius' more proper and stuffy disciples (who often did live down to the caricature) in another. Each had its up side and its down side. Imagine Pooh singing and philosophizing cheerfully at the still-warm grave of Piglet: that's Zhuang Zi, at one point.

The world would be poorer without Pooh, and much poorer without the aphorisms of Lao Zi and the stories of Zhuang Zi. They don't make a full philosophy of life, but they do make part of one; and Hoff's little book is a good, sometimes flawed and sometimes too accurate, but often fun, introduction.

Editorial Review:

Is there such thing as a Western Taoist? Benjamin Hoff says there is, and this Taoist's favorite food is honey. Through brilliant and witty dialogue with the beloved Pooh-bear and his companions, the author of this smash bestseller explains with ease and aplomb that rather than being a distant and mysterious concept, Taoism is as near and practical to us as our morning breakfast bowl. Romp through the enchanting world of Winnie-the-Pooh while soaking up invaluable lessons on simplicity and natural living.

A History of Reading

Alberto Manguel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

For anybody who has been graced to read to live, and others too! 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 13 people found this review helpful.

When Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in a white man's prison for being black he acknowledged that books kept him sane. When Somerset Maugham went travelling through Malaya early last century his companions were books. Any reader can identify with these two quite different gentlemen - Virginia Woolf wrote whilst at school "I have sometimes dreamt that when the day of judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards - their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble - the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, " Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading." p. 311/312 A HISTORY OF READING. The great truth that every reader knows is that books liberate one, enrich one, reveal, embolden and humanize, entertain, inform, and nourish.
Senor Manguel's excellent book does all of these things in part - I never knew that the King James Version of the Bible was composed by a committee of 49. It was enlightening too to see the author list the common fallacies held about readers: 1. all literature is political, in the sense that it influences the political consciousness of the reader (a fallacy endorsed enthusiastically by Totalitarian States)2. The influence of a text is is directly proportional to its circulation. ( Mssrs Mills and Boon presently rule the Western World non? Or is it Mr Dan Brown President?). 3. "Popular" culture has a much larger following than "high" culture and therefore it accurately reflects the attitudes of the masses; 4. "high" culture tends to reinforce acceptance of the existing social and political order (a presumption widely shared by both the left and the right), and, 5. the canon of "great books" is defined solely by social elites. Common readers eitherr do not recognise that canon, or else they accept it only out of deference to elite opinion. p. 313 HISTORY OF READING.
Other gems among the many include this from KAFKA " Altogether I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy, we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. This is what I believe. " p93 (Brilliant eh?)
There is also a touching examination of the prejudicial punishments readers have suffered because they read - beaten, shunned, imprisoned, and labelled - NERD, INTELLECTUAL, POSEUR, PRETENTIOUS TWIT, COMMUNIST etc.
Beautifully and joyfully composed, I finished Senor Manguel's fine A HISTORY OF READING on 24Dec05 and immediately started TRISTRAM SHANDY and made notes of other books mentioned that piqued my taste, nay love, of the continuing journey - a journey I shall never complete as, for example, I refuse to FINISH Proust - who would want it to end?

Editorial Review:

This wide-ranging and erudite exploration of the topic of reading is suffused with the spirit of Manguel's fellow Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges. Manguel takes us through the history of reading as if leading us room by room through the infinite library Borges constructed in one of his famous stories. Manguel's approach is not chronological, but thematic. His chapter topics jump from attempts to censor reading to the physical surroundings favored by readers, from the limitations of translations to the esotericism of books written for a restricted readership. Throughout he moves easily through time and geography to quote anecdotes and examples from diverse sources. Manguel's enthusiasm, and the impressive breadth of his reading, will make his readers eager to rush to the nearest library.

Library: An Unquiet History

Matthew Battles

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Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"Splendidly articulate, informative and provoking....A book to be savored and gone back to."—Baltimore Sun

On the survival and destruction of knowledge, from Alexandria to the Internet. Through the ages, libraries have not only accumulated and preserved but also shaped, inspired, and obliterated knowledge. Matthew Battles, a rare books librarian and a gifted narrator, takes us on a spirited foray from Boston to Baghdad, from classical scriptoria to medieval monasteries, from the Vatican to the British Library, from socialist reading rooms and rural home libraries to the Information Age.

He explores how libraries are built and how they are destroyed, from the decay of the great Alexandrian library to scroll burnings in ancient China to the destruction of Aztec books by the Spanish—and in our own time, the burning of libraries in Europe and Bosnia. Encyclopedic in its breadth and novelistic in its telling, this volume will occupy a treasured place on the bookshelf next to Baker's Double Fold, Basbanes's A Gentle Madness, Manguel's A History of Reading, and Winchester's The Professor and the Madman.

The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary

Simon Winchester

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Total reviews: 58 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, and Krakatoa comes a truly wonderful celebration of the English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English Dictionary. Writing with marvelous brio, Winchester first serves up a lightning history of the English language--"so vast, so sprawling, so wonderfully unwieldy"--and pays homage to the great dictionary makers, from "the irredeemably famous" Samuel Johnson to the "short, pale, smug and boastful" schoolmaster from New Hartford, Noah Webster. He then turns his unmatched talent for story-telling to the making of this most venerable of dictionaries. In this fast-paced narrative, the reader will discover lively portraits of such key figures as the brilliant but tubercular first editor Herbert Coleridge (grandson of the poet), the colorful, boisterous Frederick Furnivall (who left the project in a shambles), and James Augustus Henry Murray, who spent a half-century bringing the project to fruition. Winchester lovingly describes the nuts-and-bolts of dictionary making--how unexpectedly tricky the dictionary entry for marzipan was, or how fraternity turned out so much longer and monkey so much more ancient than anticipated--and how bondmaid was left out completely, its slips found lurking under a pile of books long after the B-volume had gone to press. We visit the ugly corrugated iron structure that Murray grandly dubbed the Scriptorium--the Scrippy or the Shed, as locals called it--and meet some of the legion of volunteers, from Fitzedward Hall, a bitter hermit obsessively devoted to the OED, to W. C. Minor, whose story is one of dangerous madness, ineluctable sadness, and ultimate redemption. The Meaning of Everything is a scintillating account of the creation of the greatest monument ever erected to a living language. Simon Winchester's supple, vigorous prose illuminates this dauntingly ambitious project--a seventy-year odyssey to create the grandfather of all word-books, the world's unrivalled uber-dictionary.

A Family Guide to Narnia: Biblical Truths in C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia

Christin Ditchfield

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Allows you to view Narnia in a whole new light. 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This book opened a new depth to the Chronicles.It expounds on lessons that could be easily overlooked or unnoticed.It draws parallels to biblical stories and values in a very simple and easy to follow way.This book enhanced my Narnia experience.

Good for Parents to use as a Teaching Device... 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This is good for parents to read, and then explain how the book compares to the bible to their children.

Narnia's Companion 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Like in life; men and women need companions...this family guide is a MUST for families as a companion for The Chronicles of Narnia.

"Family Guide" delivers what it promises. 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

A Family Guide to Narnia: Biblical Truths in C.S. Lewis's the Chronicles of Narnia offers the reader exactly what it promises. It is an easy-to-use reference guide for Christian families who are teaching their children Biblical truths found in the Chronicles of Narnia series.
It is certainly written in an accessible family-friendly style, and I found it an invaluable resource in the classroom as well!

Editorial Review:

Do you read The Chronicles of Narnia sensing that the stories are full of biblical parallels, even if you re not always sure what they are or where to find them? This user-friendly companion to The Chronicles of Narnia is written for C. S. Lewis readers like you who want to discover the books biblical and Christian roots.

Great Books

David Denby

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Total reviews: 53 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Denby Redux: Thirty Years after Columbia the English Literature major returns to study the Western Canon: 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 6 people found this review helpful.

David Denby wrote this book nearly a decade ago. Denby is a New York film critic; a left wing Jewish intellectual and a graduate of Columbia University. Thirty years after graduation from Columbia the 48 year old D decided he would return to a study of great literary works. He felt an emptiness in his gut. Denby's middle age malaise drove him to open the printed page for deep, enlighting and reflective thoughts on humanity, culture and his personal spiritual odyessey.
The book is a fascinating mini-course in great books. Denby takes us into the Columbia classroom where we meet different professors and students. They are a diverse group from African-Americans to foreign students; from liberals to fundamentalists; from young to old. In their dialogue the reader is asked to engage through the printed page with his/her own thoughts. There is much here dealing with the debate over the core curriculum in colleges; Denby's ties the work wit the purpose of education, reading and study in our non-reading, political correct land.
Great books by such giants of the Western tradition as Homer, the Greek dramatists; Augustine, Boccaccio; Dante; Machiavelli, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Rosseau, John Stuart Mill, John Locke, the Bible;
Simone Beavoir, Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf have chapters
exploring their importance to Western culture.
Denby's book deserves reading. Worth your time.

Editorial Review:

David Denby, New York city movie critic and journalist, entered Columbia University in 1991 to take the university's famous course in "Great Books." This is the course that, in preserving the notion of the western canon without apology to multiculturalists and feminists, has been an unlikely focus of America's culture war in recent years. Where other universities have caved in and revised or enlarged the canon, Columbia's course has remained intact. Denby's intention as a writer and protagonist in the culture war was to record the experience and the personal impact of the course. He has produced a cry from the heart in favor of the classics of western civilization, relaying with infectious enthusiasm how literature touched his soul.

A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

Nicholas A. Basbanes

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Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Strictly amateur 1 out of 5 stars.
0 of 6 people found this review helpful.

The only people impressed by Basbanes' books are those who don't really know very much about books, book collecting, libraries, or the antiquarian trade. This volume in particular is plagued with sloppy scholarship, conjecture, gossip, and unsubstantiated anecdote. He can't even get the names of major libraries right. It's certainly a fun read, but it shouldn't be taken seriously.

The passions of book- collecting 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

It is possible to love books without necessarily loving or caring for what is inside them. It is also possible to love books because one wishes to possess the knowledge, understanding, beauty, that is within them. In this truly epic history of book- collecting and its most passionate and eccentric collectors Basbanes uses his considerable journalistic skill to tell a story which no lover of books, inside or out, will want to miss. Incredible collectors who were more the slaves of their books( The bibliomaniacs) and who were more their masters ( The bibliophiles) have their histories told here. In the background is the long story of the thing - itself, its making and its transformations in time.
Basbanes also emphasizes the fact that the collectors have been great benefactors of human culture and learning. Their collections , as that of John Harvard have been the basis of great institutions of learning.
While some were so obsessed by possessing the books for themselves ( The world's greatest bibliokleptomaniac Stephen Blumberg whose story is featured when asked why he did not sell the books and make himself rich said " I want them all for myself") others deliberately collected for the benefit of Mankind ( The story of Aaron Lansky's singlehandedly saving a considerable share of the Yiddish books which otherwise would have bee lost, is an extremely moving one) .The nineteenth century French collector Xavier Marmier willed his own large collection to his provincial town library. But he also expressed gratitude to the booksellers whose shops he would visit each day. And above all he expressed his love of collecting, and how much pleasure he had derived from searching through and finding the treasures of his collection.
All in all this is a ' classic work' about one of humanity's most harmless obsessions, or as the title of the work calls it ' the gentle madness'. It provides what great literature of all kinds does, an enhanced sense of the possibilities of human life.

Editorial Review:

What a delightful book about books and people who love books! As a second generation bibliophile, a possible bibliomane who had several people move out of my house a year ago because they erroneously believed that my books were taking over the household, and a devout employee of "Earth's Biggest Bookstore," I can vouch that Basbanes accurately describes the glorious role of book collectors as archivists of human knowledge, and -- in continual counterpoint -- sometimes pathologically obsessed book junkies.

Reading National Geographic

Catherine A. Lutz, Jane L. Collins

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

For its millions of readers, the National Geographic has long been a window to the world of exotic peoples and places. In this fascinating account of an American institution, Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins explore the possibility that the magazine, in purporting to teach us about distant cultures, actually tells us much more about our own.

Lutz and Collins take us inside the National Geographic Society to investigate how its photographers, editors, and designers select images and text to produce representations of Third World cultures. Through interviews with the editors, they describe the process as one of negotiating standards of "balance" and "objectivity," informational content and visual beauty. Then, in a close reading of some six hundred photographs, they examine issues of race, gender, privilege, progress, and modernity through an analysis of the way such things as color, pose, framing, and vantage point are used in representations of non-Western peoples. Finally, through extensive interviews with readers, the authors assess how the cultural narratives of the magazine are received and interpreted, and identify a tension between the desire to know about other peoples and their ways and the wish to validate middle-class American values.

The result is a complex portrait of an institution and its role in promoting a kind of conservative humanism that acknowledges universal values and celebrates diversity while it allows readers to relegate non-Western peoples to an earlier stage of progress. We see the magazine and the Society as a key middlebrow arbiter of taste, wealth, and power in America, and we get a telling glimpse into middle-class American culture and all the wishes, assumptions, and fears it brings to bear on our armchair explorations of the world.

Kafka's Soup: A Complete History of World Literature in 14 Recipes

Mark Crick

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

I needed a table at Maxim’s, a hundred bucks, and a gorgeous blonde; what I had was a leg of lamb and no clues. I took hold of the joint. It felt cold and damp, like a coroner’s handshake. I took out a knife and cut the lamb into pieces. Feeling the blade in my hand I sliced an onion, and before I knew what I was doing a carrot lay in pieces on the slab. None of them moved.
—from “LAMB WITH DILL SAUCE
À LA RAYMOND CHANDLER”

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to make dinner with Franz Kafka, Jane Austen, or Raymond Chandler, this is the chance to find out.

Literary ventriloquist Mark Crick presents fourteen recipes in the voices of famous writers, from Homer to Virginia Woolf to Irvine Welsh.

Guaranteed to delight anyone in love with food and books, these witty pastiches will keep you so entertained in the kitchen that you’ll be sorry when the guests arrive.