Back playing his theme music - "the process by which new ideas
emerge is serendipitous and interactive" - is the hugely
entertaining Burke (The Pinball Effect, 1996, etc.). He's off on
another of his joyrides, following the often bizarre pathways that
lead from one idea to another, following like a bloodhound the
threads that link events and notions and personalities. And he
doesn't just list the things passing strange before his purview, he
stops to examine them and deliver a smart little explication. He's
not just amused to learn that the Magnetico-Electrico Celestial
Bed, wherein the administrations of shocks to the participants was
said to "ensure immediate conception," can be found on the road to
the cornflake, he wants readers to know why. And it's pure pleasure
to read as he unravels the skein knotting the pugnacious father of
cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, to the equally pugnacious
antivivisectionists, and "a thirty-three-year-old married
Englishwoman with a hidden past and the habit of wearing no
underwear" to, 211 pages later, the Elgin marbles. Burke again
makes use of "gateways" in his narrative, a system of numeric codes
that link distant strands within the text into a literary subspace,
allowing readers to skip about throughout the book, as if Burke's
caperings aren't entertainment enough, though it does drive home
why Burke is so pleased that the word "web" has gained such
currency. There are vague rumblings at the beginning of this book
about a new system of knowledge gathering, sowing democracy and
enfranchising the uneducated in its wake, that Burke will
introduce, in which semi-intelligent computer software helps weed
through the information glut unleashed by the Internet. That would
suggest undermining the very serendipity and interactivity that
enthralls him so, and he wisely doesn't mention it again after the
introduction. Burke is in a league alone when it comes to
freewheeling intellectual curiosity and mapping nature's strange
designs. (Kirkus Reviews)
In The Knowledge Web, James Burke, the bestselling author and host of television's Connections series, takes us on a fascinating tour through the interlocking threads of knowledge running through Western history. Displaying mesmerizing flights of fancy, he shows how seemingly unrelated ideas and innovations bounce off one another, spinning a vast, interactive web on which everything is connected to everything else: Carmen leads to the theory of relativity, champagne bottling links to wallpaper design, Joan of Arc connects through vaudeville to Buffalo Bill.
Illustrating his open, connective theme in the form of a journey across a web, Burke breaks down complex concepts, offering information in a manner accessible to anybody -- high school graduates and Ph.D. holders alike. The journey touches almost two hundred interlinked points in the history of knowledge, ultimately ending where it begins.
At once amusing and instructing, The Knowledge Web heightens our awareness of our interdependence -- with one another and with the past. Only by understanding the interrelated nature of the modern world can we hope to identify complex patterns of change and direct the process of innovation to the common good.
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