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A review by bupdaddy
Paper: Paging Through History by Mark Kurlansky
3.0
Like other reviewers have noted, this Paper book covers a lot of writing as well as paper itself, but more important, it just doesn't seem careful with its research, unlike Salt.
After reading that Islam in the Middle Ages conquered land as far east (sic) as the Iberian peninsula and as far west (sic) as modern day Pakistan, and reading that a Japanese plot in World War II to have paper balloons deliver bombs over the west coast in retaliation for the Doolittle raid, but that it had been researched for more than a decade and wasn't tried until two years after the Doolittle raid, and that alcohol isn't mentioned in the Q'uran because alcohol probably wasn't known in the early days of Islam, I thought this book wasn't edited well, and I couldn't trust much I did (maybe?) learn. I mean, east/west is a simple mistake, and maybe there's a way of parsing the whole paper balloons/bombs narrative that would allow for military research to have been done since the early 30's and it took two years after the Doolittle raid to get the effort into action, and the Doolittle raid was the thing that pushed this odd project from just military research to 'we're going to do this even if it takes two more years,' and maybe he meant heavily distilled, or nearly pure, alcohol wasn't known ca. 600 CE, because wine is all over the bible, so known to the old world, but would you trust all that?
And that, of course, is just the stuff I noticed without looking into it. When he talks about Civil War photography and the hope that it would remove the romance of war, replacing it with the real as-it-happened carnage, I remembered that this book covers the fact that a lot of dead soldiers were moved and posed to make the photos more dramatic (or, say, romantic); moreover, some 'corpses' weren't even dead. Enough to make Kurlansky's point null and void? Dunno. But I don't trust it by any means because of the other stuff.
I guess I learned a bunch, but I don't know what it is, because I don't know which things are right and which aren't.
Finally, he seems bent on an overarching premise that technology doesn't change society - he says it's the other way around. For instance, paper didn't change the world, the changing world required and therefore created paper. I don't know why he was so invested in it - and not just with paper, but with all technology, and made it such a black-and-white proposition, but it was irksome. There have been desires to fly since time immemorial. It didn't happen until it did, and then powered flight changed society. Instant communication through the ether had been conceived centuries before radio, but radio changed society, not the other way 'round.
After reading that Islam in the Middle Ages conquered land as far east (sic) as the Iberian peninsula and as far west (sic) as modern day Pakistan, and reading that a Japanese plot in World War II to have paper balloons deliver bombs over the west coast in retaliation for the Doolittle raid, but that it had been researched for more than a decade and wasn't tried until two years after the Doolittle raid, and that alcohol isn't mentioned in the Q'uran because alcohol probably wasn't known in the early days of Islam, I thought this book wasn't edited well, and I couldn't trust much I did (maybe?) learn. I mean, east/west is a simple mistake, and maybe there's a way of parsing the whole paper balloons/bombs narrative that would allow for military research to have been done since the early 30's and it took two years after the Doolittle raid to get the effort into action, and the Doolittle raid was the thing that pushed this odd project from just military research to 'we're going to do this even if it takes two more years,' and maybe he meant heavily distilled, or nearly pure, alcohol wasn't known ca. 600 CE, because wine is all over the bible, so known to the old world, but would you trust all that?
And that, of course, is just the stuff I noticed without looking into it. When he talks about Civil War photography and the hope that it would remove the romance of war, replacing it with the real as-it-happened carnage, I remembered that this book covers the fact that a lot of dead soldiers were moved and posed to make the photos more dramatic (or, say, romantic); moreover, some 'corpses' weren't even dead. Enough to make Kurlansky's point null and void? Dunno. But I don't trust it by any means because of the other stuff.
I guess I learned a bunch, but I don't know what it is, because I don't know which things are right and which aren't.
Finally, he seems bent on an overarching premise that technology doesn't change society - he says it's the other way around. For instance, paper didn't change the world, the changing world required and therefore created paper. I don't know why he was so invested in it - and not just with paper, but with all technology, and made it such a black-and-white proposition, but it was irksome. There have been desires to fly since time immemorial. It didn't happen until it did, and then powered flight changed society. Instant communication through the ether had been conceived centuries before radio, but radio changed society, not the other way 'round.