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Product Details
Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin (December 17, 2013)
When I spotted "The Guardian of All Things: The Epic Story of Human Memory" at my local library I was positively mesmerized by the topic. However, being a scientifically and technologically challenged individual I wondered if I was going to be able to keep up. Nevertheless I decided to take the plunge. I am very pleased to report that despite the complexity of the subject matter Michael S. Malone has come up with a very readable volume. This history of memory proves to be incredibly enlightening and endlessly fascinating. I simply could not put this book down.
So just what happened during the transformation form Neanderthal to modern man some 50000 years ago in Asia and perhaps around 30000 years ago in Europe? As Michael Malone explains it the Neanderthal brain was totally focused on the present. There was absolutely no language and therefore no memory. Neanderthal man could neither remember the past nor contemplate the future. But over time human beings developed the ability to hear and to make sounds. As homo sapiens continued to evolve over the millennia they could talk, form relationships, create art and tell stories. About 10000 years ago hunter-gathers would give way to an agricultural society. Not only would there be spoken languages but as the result of commerce and trade counting and arithmetic and finally written languages would evolve. And as Malone points out "The ability to write meant the ability to record information to remove something from one's own memory and place it into a cache of synthetic memory where it could remain largely untended until it was needed again. This recorded memory could also be shared with others with a precision never before available with human beings passing messages from one to another.Read more ›
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This book is wonderful. It's about memory but only a very small portion of the book is about memory in human brains. It's about how humans have collected and stored their collective memory first in language in human brains and then externally in drawings and written language. From there he goes through the collection of memory in clay tablets, animal skins, reeds, and paper and the collection of all of this into vast libraries. The book travels through photography, film, audio, magnetic tape, magnetic disks, chips and microprocessors, the internet, and the rest of the modern digital world.
It's a fascinating journey that is quite unusual. This book has Amazon's "Search Inside" feature so you should take advantage of that to preview its contents. I enjoyed it and I think you will too.
Definitely recommended.
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Michael Malone has written a wonderful journey through Western Civilization using the skills and tools needed to past that history from generation to generation as the framework to build his story.
I began reading, expecting to be bored to death. However, I found myself sneaking reading times - staying a bit longer at a restaurant, postponing the start of other tasks, staying up a bit later - all in order to get through the book. Malone begins with the development of speech and moves forward through history.
I found the chapter discussing the "Art of Memory" to be the most fascinating - having never encountered it before. In one chapter the author discusses the influence of well-known inventors, such as Thomas Edison, Thomas Watson, and the work of John Shaw Billings and Herman Hollerith and the development of the Hollerith Punched Card Tabulating Machine in preparation for the 1890 census. In a similar vein, it was also interesting to read the history of George Eastman (the founder of Kodak). Having spent years in the computer industry, it helped to see how the influence of many of these tools also drove the future development of the computer industry. The connections drawn in the book are not always linear - as people living in the same century often influenced each others work - occasionally forcing the author to move in circles as he discusses multiple tools and lives developing tools for recording history.
I do wish there were an accompanying web page - links to pictures or to additional details would add to the value of the book. I can always use Google to find links, but that gives me no way to evaluate the material.Read more ›
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Basically a recount of how information was stored extrasomatically in the course of history. Absolutely nothing about somatic (i.e. human) memory processes. The "research" is primarily Wikipedia. In a word, tedious (certainly not "epic").Would have made a decent (B+) term paper (maybe it was) except far too long for what it accomplishes.
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The history of man's quest to remember the past is totally engrossing. Unfortunately Michael Malone emphasizes the developments in the past 50 years. Although much has happened recently, to use a third of the book to cover the past 50 or so years and the rest of the book to cover millennia seems disproportioned. That said, a popular review of the struggle man has gone through to remember is fascinating. Learned a lot, hopefully I will remember.
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This item: The Guardian of All Things: The Epic Story of Human Memory
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