The Greatest Invention

October 1, 2021

A Duff Cooper Prize winner for Becoming Dickens, Oxford English professor Douglas-Fairhurst argues that for Dickens the emotionally tumultuous year of 1851 was The Turning Point that singularly shaped his oeuvre. A professor of Aegean civilization at the University of Bologna, Ferrera moves from Mesopotamia and Crete to China, Central America, Easter Island, and beyond to chronicle The Greatest Invention--writing. In I Was Better Last Night, Fierstein talks about being a cultural icon, gay rights activist, and four-time Tony Award-winning actor and playwright. Emmy Award-winning writer Galloway, who created the Reporter's famed Oscar Roundtables, revisits Madly in love Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, among the first global celebrities (75,000-copy first printing). In Keats, British literary critic Miller uses verse and epitaph, e.g., "Endymion," "Bright Star," to explore the life of the English Romantic and present him less as dreamer than subversive. In a book structured as a series of letters to her book-loving father, Nafisi urges us to Read Dangerously, addressing literature as both solace and subversive power that can challenge repressive politics; originally scheduled for August 2021 (75,000-copy first printing). Oscar-nominated screenwriter, director, and actor Polley offers six essays capturing moments of her life, from stage fright to risky childbirth to healing herself after traumatic injury by retraining her mind to Run Towards the Danger, i.e., the very things that triggered her recurrent symptoms. The creator of The Good Place and cocreator of Parks and Recreation, Schur offers How To Be Perfect as a laugh-out-loud guide to living not the good life but the better life (200,000-copy first printing). Lead singer of the Ronettes--remember Be My Baby?--Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Spector recounts professional collaboration with and marriage to Phil Spector, then fighting to reclaim her musical legacy and her life (75,000-copy first printing).

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November 15, 2021
A scholar of archaeology and linguistics leads us on "an uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research, and the faint, fleeting echo of writing's future." Deftly translated by Portnowitz, Ferrara's book is more than a cook's tour of the history, present, and future of writing. It's so dense and detailed it could also serve as an academic text. "Writing is an entire world to be discovered, but it is also a filter through which to observe...our world: language, art, biology, geometry, psychology, intuition, logic," writes Ferrara, a professor in the department of classical philology and Italian studies at the University of Bologna. She argues that the invention of writing as a complete and structured system derived from a series of gradual, cumulative, coordinated actions (and luck)--a cultural product, not an innate skill. Ferrara explores the creation of scripts (some yet to be deciphered) in China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Crete, Easter Island, Cyprus, and Mesoamerica, beginning with their origins as images, icons, and logograms. She reveals the enduring power of the alphabet and how learning to write and read are physically mind-altering, and she investigates why writing, a useful technology, if not a necessity, came about. The author offers fascinating historical accounts, observations (especially on today's retro embrace of iconography), and deductions (at heart, the book is a detective story). She is thorough, perhaps to a fault. General readers may find the text too heavy on technical analysis. By contrast, Ferrara occasionally takes off on flights of giddy romanticism, though the scientist usually regains control. Her expertise and enthusiasm compensate for some of the pop-culture diversions, unbridled conjectures, and a few debatable assertions--e.g., "Collaboration is at the root of every modicum of progress ever gained"; "Art is not something that can be deciphered. It simply is." Nonetheless, the author knows when to eschew overly definitive statements when it comes to the intersections of writing and language. Ferrara capably conveys the sensory magic of writing: sound made visible and tangible.

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Starred review from November 22, 2021
Ferrara (Cypro-Minoan Inscriptions), professor of Aegean civilization at the University of Bologna, takes an entertaining and complex look at how written language has evolved. As she notes, readers may have “a vague, Proustian memory... from your days in elementary or middle school, something about Mesopotamia and how cuneiform was the first and only time writing was invented, the source from which all other scripts descended.” In fact, she suggests, writing, which she calls the “greatest invention in the world,” without which “we would be only voice, suspended in a continual present,” was invented at least three other times, in China, Egypt, and Central America. Her sweeping survey covers quipu, a method of documentation using thousands of strings and knots used by the Incans to “govern an empire” for two centuries in the 15th and 16th centuries; inscriptions carved into the bottom parts of turtle shells in ancient China; and the invention of the tablet in Mesopotamia. Ferrara’s survey is intricate and detailed, bolstered by photos and drawings of the various writing forms. The result is an intellectual feast that will enthrall admirers of Nicholas Basbanes’s On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History.

Starred review from March 1, 2022

Ferrara's (classical philology and Italian studies, Univ. of Bologna; Cypro-Minoan Inscriptions, Vols. 1 and 2) book discusses how written language came about, where it's occurred and why, and how writing evolves. Her research group analyzes the invention of writing globally, using the customary techniques of translation, augmented by insights from linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, visual perception, digital imaging, and machine learning. Ferrara is an expert on the undeciphered Aegean writings (Cretan Hieroglyphic; Linear A; Cypro-Minoan) of the second millennium BCE, but her group also studies Chinese, Indian, Central American, and even Easter Islands (Rongorongo) texts. Here she writes about the problem of interpreting texts in tongues that aren't cross-referenced to other already-known tongues (as with the Rosetta Stone). Writing starts with iconic signs: a picture of a falcon represents the word for falcon, Ferrara posits; when syllables in a pictograph are adapted to represent pure sounds, the leap is made to non-iconic syllables that can be combined to represent new things, jumping from object to object because they sound alike (homophony). This fascinating book bursts with new information and ideas. VERDICT In the tradition of the best popular science writing, Ferrara expresses complex ideas in language understandable and appealing to the educated layperson.--David Keymer

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2022
Ferrara, a professor of Aegean civilization at the University of Bologna, has crafted a book about a dizzyingly complex topic--the creation of written language--in a way professors too rarely do. Not that there's any swashbuckling tomb-raiding here, just a careful scientist with a chatty, lucid style and a knack for anecdote. The deciphering of ancient scripts and determination of their origins is a collaborative effort, the work extraordinarily hard and requiring enormous patience. Crypto-Minoan, Cretan Hieroglyphic, Indus Valley Script, Rongorongo from Easter Island--these are some of the mysteries she describes so vividly. Ferrara skips from Hildegard of Bingen, an eleventh-century abbess, migraine-sufferer, composer, and inventor of an alphabet, to the forgotten yet unforgettable Alice Kober, who "was known to file the note cards with her analytical diagrams [of Linear B] in her empty Lucky Strike cartons"; Sequoyah, inventor of the Cherokee syllabary; Shong Lue Yang, an illiterate basket-weaver who had a vision and invented Pahawh Hmong, "a semi-syllabary"; and many others. If one has any doubts that the ancient past deserves our attention as much as the future Ferrara also energetically imagines, this book should dispel them. Encountered at the right time, this book could ignite a passion, even change a life.

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