Publishers Weekly
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This book begins and ends with a description of the looting of books, manuscripts and artworks in Iraq's National Library in 2003, a destruction abetted, says Baez, by the inaction of American leaders. This episode poses an "enigma" for the author: "Why should this murder of memory have occurred in the place where the book was born?" Beginning with ancient Mesopotamia, Venezuelan historian Baez (The History of the Ancient Library of Alexandria) considers the wide-ranging reasons why books are destroyed: the desire of conquerors to eradicate their predecessors or foreign cultures, religious intolerance, fire and other natural or man-made disasters. Other books were lost because they were no longer considered important, and we know of them only through references in other works. Baez includes a fascinating chapter on fictional bibliocasts (book destroyers), from Don Quixote to Fahrenheit 451. He sometimes overwhelms the reader with authors, titles and statistics. Still, this marvelously informative, sometimes depressing, occasionally entertaining work should appeal to bibliophiles. (Aug. 18) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Choice
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
This deceptively compact book works on the premise that human history can be measured by what people destroy as well as by what they preserve. The author, the director of the Venezuela National Library, exhibits his erudition and is a bibliophile of the first order. As such, his history functions as a global history as much as a record of books, manuscripts, and other written materials often lost through natural occurrences such as fire, as well as through human agency. The latter, which Baez terms a "bibliocaust," is covered extensively. He makes clear that writing is a central tenet of human civilization as a "tool for social organization and reaffirmation" and, particularly, is a "symbol of human thought and memory." By this token, the opposite act of destruction is symbolic of the human tendency to divide the world into the familiar and its threatening opposite. The book is divided chronologically: up to the 4th century CE, 4th through 19th centuries, and the 20th century onward. The final chapter on book destruction in Iraq may need future revision, as its extent is still being disputed. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. N. C. Rothman University of Maryland University College
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Venezuelan historian Báez spent what must have been 12 depressing years assembling this horrific chronicle of the centuries-long assault on human memory. Beginning and ending in Baghdad 2003, with a description of U.S. soldiers standing idly by while mobs looted and burned the National Library (perhaps one million books lost), the author's English-language debut moves determinedly from ancient times to the present. Biblioclasm is not a new phenomenon, he demonstrates: For reasons varying from invasion and vandalism to pure viciousness, more than 80 percent of Egyptian literature has been lost, only seven of Sophocles's 120 plays survive and millions of ancient tablets and scrolls have vanished. Contrary to popular conception, Báez notes, it is not often the ignorant who order and execute the destruction of books and libraries. It is instead the powerful, sometimes even the highly educated, who insist that their truth be the only one and all others must perish. His text roams the world, revisiting bibliocausts on all continents in all centuries. (It also covers the fictional destruction of books, with a nod to Don Quixote as the first to deal with this issue and several references to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.) Emerging religions have their works destroyed and then, when they supplant the original destroyers, commence destructions of their own. Romans destroyed Christian documents; Christians destroyed the Romans'; Catholics burned Protestant manuscripts; Henry VIII eradicated monastic libraries in England; and so on. Invading Spaniards destroyed written records in the New World; Spanish Fascists burned their own country's history. Nazis and Communists and American atomic bombs have done their worst. Báez pauses occasionally to consider such natural disasters as earthquakes, floods and flames, or the damage wrought by beetles, worms and acidic paper. These asides serve merely to remind us that books' greatest enemy stares back at us from history's mirror. A sobering reminder of just how deep-seated is the instinct to destroy other people's truths. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
*Starred Review* Each destroyed book is a passport to hell. In the outcry of a poet witnessing the firebombing of Sarajevo's National Library, Báez finds a leitmotif for this compelling investigation of book-burning. Though he acknowledges as a predecessor William Blades (author of Enemies of Books, 1888), Báez has given the world its first truly comprehensive history of biblioclasty. And now, thanks to a capable translator, English-speaking readers can share in an impressive scholarship that catalogs depredations against books through the centuries. Readers see, for instance, how the pharaoh Akhenaton burned offensive religious texts in ancient Egypt and how Stalin consigned reactionary works by Kant and Descartes to the flames in modern Russia; how Almanzor purged the medieval libraries of Islamic Spain of books not sacred to pious Moslems and how Spanish missionaries torched pagan Aztec codices in sixteenth-century Mexico. In this remarkably wide-ranging survey of assaults against books, a unifying pattern emerges, defying the stereotype of book-burners as ignorant rubes. Báez convincingly characterizes the typical book-burner not as a hick, but as a zealot: the book-burner hopes to realize some vision for a luminous future by reducing to ashes the printed reminders of a shadowed past. Librarians and readers alike will cherish this cautionary chronicle.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2008 Booklist