More book flogging
August 14, 2007
A couple of new book reviews have surfaced in the last few days:
- Patrick Tucker gives the book a good workout in the Wilson Quarterly (issue not available online yet). He generally likes the narrative, but dings me for "oversimplifying" my conclusions in search of a unifying historical theory (a criticism I anticipated, when I wrote in the introduction that "historians tend to look skeptically at 'meta' histories that go in search of long-term historical trajectories." And so they do). Nonetheless, he concludes that the "book does succeed beautifully as a museum in which various artifacts reveal how humankind has used wit, reason, and imagination to store and compute data. Nothing, in fact, could be more human."
- Out in the heartland, Carlo Wolff gives the book a nice write-up in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, calling it "a tough but rewarding read, an ambitious dip into what anthropology, statistics and computer science can tell us about our information systems, and our current embrace of the World Wide Web. Rigorously considered and extensively researched, 'Glut' raises the right questions and never settles for easy answers."
File under: Glut
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GLUT:
Mastering Information Through the Ages
New Paperback Edition
“A penetrating and highly entertaining meditation on the information age and its historical roots.”
—Los Angeles Times
