A book about transmitting knowledge by someone who has made his name by doing just that in the most erudite and entertaining way possible….a delightful compendium of the kind of facts you immediately want to share with anyone you encounter . . . . Simon Winchester has firmly earned his place in history . . . as a promulgator of knowledge of every variety, perhaps the last of the famous explorers who crisscrossed the now-vanished British Empire and reported what they found to an astonished world . . . .” — New York Times
“With his typical fluency and range, Mr. Winchester . . . traces the intertwined evolution of knowledge, society and the individual, from ancient illiteracy to the wisdom of the hour, artificial intelligence . . . . Winchester is adroit at arranging information in pursuit of knowledge, and he has an eye for the anecdote . . . . Winchester is a knowledge keeper for our times, and he does us all a service by writing it down.” — Wall Street Journal
“[This] genial and much admired author . . . might be appropriately dubbed the One-Man Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge of our own era. Whatever his subject, Winchester leavens deep research and the crisp factual writing of a reporter . . . with an abundance of curious anecdotes, footnotes and digressions. His prose is always clear, but it is also invigorated with pleasingly elegant diction. . . . He is a pleasure to read, or even to listen to, as devotees of his audiobooks can testify. . . . Informative and entertaining throughout.” — Michael Dirda, Washington Post
"Winchester has written about information systems before, as in his 1998 book The Professor and the Madman, about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. In his robust new compendium, the author examines those systems in far grander scope, from mankind’s earliest attempts at language to the digital worlds we now keep in our pockets. This isn’t just a rollicking look back; Winchester asks what these systems do to our minds, for good and ill." — Los Angeles Times
“[An] ebullient, irrepressible spirit invests this book. It is erudite and sprightly in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has read Winchester’s wonderful histories of the Krakatoa eruption, the origins of the Oxford English Dictionary and the Atlantic (among others).” — Sunday Times (London)
“A testament to [Winchester’s] abiding interest in history, human innovation, and his distinctive ability to share his insatiable curiosity with enthusiastic readers. . . . Winchester’s sheer joy in imparting what he learns is evident on every page. . . . [His] ebullient style and countless irresistible anecdotes and strange facts inspire the reader to knowledge for themselves. . . . Essential reading.” — Booklist, starred review
“…erudite and discursive…. Winchester gathers fascinating and varied examples from throughout history and around the world…. a stimulating cabinet of wonders.” — Publishers Weekly
“Erudite, digressive, and brimming with fascinating information.” — Kirkus Reviews
"The historical episodes recorded in this book are gorgeous in their detail." — Sydney Morning Herald
"The acclaimed Winchester leaps nimbly from cuneiform writings through Gutenberg to Google and Wikipedia as he examines Knowing What We Know—that is, how we acquire, retain, and pass on information—and how technology’s current capability to do those things for us might be threatening our ability to think." — Library Journal
"In classic Winchester style, [the book] combines a panoramic and microscopic view of this imposing subject, one that simultaneously enlightens and stimulates intellectual curiosity . . . . One of the delights of Knowing What We Know is Winchester’s skill at character sketches of figures who almost certainly aren’t familiar to the general reader, but who nonetheless he considers vital contributors to the advancement of human knowledge." — Bookreporter
Few author/narrators sound as richly knowledgeable as Simon Winchester, the prolific British popular historian whose cosmopolitan voice has distinguished more than two dozen of his audiobooks on that many different subjects. Here he addresses the subject of knowledge itself--how knowledge has been transmitted and received over the centuries. Vast as that topic might sound, Winchester's focus is always specific and insightful, especially when he tracks the spread of the news of the Krakatoa volcano eruption in 1883 or the endurance--and sometimes suppression--of several iconic news photos. Winchester is not just the best narrator of his own work, he is also unequaled in his ease, grace, erudition, and a lengthy list of other outstanding attributes. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Few author/narrators sound as richly knowledgeable as Simon Winchester, the prolific British popular historian whose cosmopolitan voice has distinguished more than two dozen of his audiobooks on that many different subjects. Here he addresses the subject of knowledge itself--how knowledge has been transmitted and received over the centuries. Vast as that topic might sound, Winchester's focus is always specific and insightful, especially when he tracks the spread of the news of the Krakatoa volcano eruption in 1883 or the endurance--and sometimes suppression--of several iconic news photos. Winchester is not just the best narrator of his own work, he is also unequaled in his ease, grace, erudition, and a lengthy list of other outstanding attributes. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
2023-02-16
A study of the problematic nature of wisdom.
Prolific historian Winchester brings his insatiable curiosity to a wide-ranging examination of how humans have acquired, retained, and passed on knowledge from ancient times to the information-saturated present. Drawing on abundant research and autobiographical reflections on personal experiences of learning, the author creates an engaging narrative populated by a vast array of individuals, including philosophers, religious figures, polymaths, inventors, and researchers from all over the world: Confucius and Aristotle, Charles Babbage and Thomas Babington Macaulay; Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Tim Berners-Lee, to name a few. Winchester examines the development of writing systems, the evolution of scrolls into books, and the various innovations for storing knowledge that have taken the form of encyclopedias, libraries, and museums. He considers the impacts of the inventions of paper, the printing press, and newspapers as well as the spread of misinformation and suppression of information by governments or political factions. Not surprisingly, he devotes much attention to computers, first demonstrated to an amazed public in 1968; the invention of hypertext; the founding of the World Wide Web; the release of Wikipedia in 2001; and the strides being made in artificial intelligence. Winchester’s overriding concern is the future of thinking: “If machines will acquire all our knowledge for us and do our thinking for us, then what, pray, is the need for us to be?” If GPS makes map-reading an antiquated skill, if Wikipedia makes retaining information unnecessary, if calculators do our math problems, what happens to the capacity of our minds? “How, in sum, do we value the knowledge that, thanks to the magic of electronics, is now cast before us in so vast and ceaseless and unstoppable a cascade?” asks the author. “Amid the torrent and its fury, what is to become of thought—care and calm and quiet thoughtfulness? What of our own chance of ever gaining wisdom? Do we need it?”
Erudite, digressive, and brimming with fascinating information.
