The Written World: How Literature Shaped History

This is an outstanding overview of the role of literature in world history. It has the immediacy of good lectures, lectures in which the speaker actually involves himself in the material and shares his understanding at a personal as well as an intellectual level.

Fascinating--introduced me to new ways of understanding seminal texts. Highly recommend,

Don't bother with this book. This is the author's personal attempt to appear erudite by discussing little known and sometimes irrelevant pieces of literature and foist them off as having significant impact . One could find 100 books with more impact than his top ten, but then perhaps that might be too boring or too obvious? There are other books on this general subject matter that are more objective and more true.

A fun romp through 4000 years of literature that covers everything from the technical inventions of paper, parchment, and print to great and enduring texts such as the Bible, Homer, Plato, Buddhism, Qur’an, Confucius, Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, and the Declaration of Independence. In reading this book, I also discovered texts I didn’t know about, such as the Japanese novel The Tale of Genji—the first great novel in world literature—and the Maya epic Popol Vuh. Who knew! Puchner manages to convey all this through great stories, stories of how these texts were written, how some were lost, rediscovered, and deciphered. The author has also interviewed some of the contemporary writers such as Nobel-prize winners Orhan Pamuk and Derek Walcott. This is world history as seen through literature. A great story, vividly told.

This book has been very well reviewed, so I find myself in a minority: I found parts of it rather irritating! In spite of the sub-title, "How Literature Shapes History ", it tackles the interaction between technologies and the spread of literature, plus the influence of literature on history, and the influence of history on literature, seeming to switch between these aspects. The author states that his editor encouraged him to put more of himself into the book, and for me this seemed to dissipate its focus. I enjoyed the early chapters very much but lost the plot, as it were, in later chapters, notably on Franklin and Goethe, though I was intrigued by the section on Akhmatova and Solzhenitsyn. I was left with the feeling the author would have done better to tackle fewer aspects in one book. Minor irritations included the fact that the author called the Sirens of the Odyssey "dangerous harpies"; although "harpies" has no capital H, I did wonder whether the author realised the two groups were not the same thing. Likewise, the phrase "(more people), who then innovate new forms" worried me - "innovate" and "new" together are tautology and to innovate is not a transitive verb!! Finally, although fully realising that the focus is on world literature by an American, given that it is written in English and that a description of a literary festival in India notes people lamenting over the dominance of English, I was sad that no chapter on, for example, reasons for the spread of English, or the influence of Shakespeare or the King James Bible or John Bunyan or Thomas Paine etc. was included. J.K. Rowling did appear,, with comments both critical ( too much medieval romance plus boarding school) and complimentary ( working on her own she invented a new world). I could have done with less on the Apollo 8 mission. I thought at first I was going to enjoy this, but found it too diffuse; however, no-one can quarrel with the argument that the world would be a poorer place without literature.

This is a book for serious study of literature and history. It is also fascinating for the bibliophile, for, as Puchner explains, ‘Literature isn’t just for book lovers.’ If there were no literature the bookshelves of the world would have been half empty, he says. That might be a slight exaggeration, but we get the point. From an account of the epic Gilgamesh, which has a story of global flooding identical to the story of Noah and the Ark (a much later story) written in cuneiform about 670 B.C.E. to Murasaki and the Tale of the Genji, the first modern novel written in Kyoto in 1000 C.E., we are treated with story after story of the history of landmark classics and their authors. Fans of Don Quixote will find the account of how Miguel Cervantes come through trying times and personal despair to produce his famous book. The journey through literary times ends in Annenberg Hall, Harvard University, credited as the original source for the Great Hall at Hogwarts. Harry Potter, it seems, has won a seat in the great hall of literature.

I was really enjoying this until it reached the 20th century and turned into the author's travelogue, the later chapters being full of 'When I was here/there....', 'When I met.....' As a life-long book worm, I got so bored, it has the distinction of being one of the very few I didn't bother reading to the end.

Very clear and thought provoking. A neat subversion of the usual!

The author describes the evolution of written literature around the world. In doing so, he discusses how the evolution of technology influenced the evolution of writing. He also visits many of the places that served as crucibles of key works of literature and discusses how geography influenced the literature as well. It is thoroughly enjoyable and an ideal book for members of Library Thing with a passion for books.