It was an interesting read at some points but a bit dull through some parts. I wouldn’t read if you’re in bed

Puchner takes us on a tour of moments in world literature that had a significant and lasting impact on writing, story, and culture. With such an expansive topic, it would have been easy to meander and lose the thread here, but by picking critical moments in history and telling a story around them, we are presented with a cohesive and fairly comprehensive chronology. This is recommended reading for anyone who thrives on language and story. I ended up listening to this on audio, and it was a perfect fit.

And what a fantastic written world this is! If you are a lover of literature and books, this is a delightful deep dive into some of the texts that have shaped our world--world culture, politics, religion, trade and far more. I loved learning the stories behind books I've loved, and stories about books I haven't yet read but cannot wait to read. I've already put One Thousand and One Nights on my to re-read list. If there was one thing I was surprised about in this book its that Puchner chose not to include The Satyricon, which is considered to be the first book that we can call a novel. But it's a small thing compared to the other things I learned about one of my favorite pastimes--reading.

For all history buffs and wordsmiths who are interested in how language and the use of stories have shaped out world today. A different approach to the study of human civilization. In the end the reader understands the importance and necessity of education and a free speech.

If you liked A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel, this is a great addition to your library. Straight forward, personal and fascinating.

Puchner’s examination of the growth of literature and its impact on civilizations throughout history is fascinating. I enjoyed every chapter and, honestly, learned quite a lot about how the written word truly influenced every society. I liked the fact that the narrative isn’t just of a person citing researched facts from inside a library or office, but that Puchner actually traveled the world searching out clues and trying to piece together the very complicated puzzle of how and when written literature started in the various places around the world and then spread. I also enjoyed the fact that the examination of the impact on civilizations did not stop with ancient civilizations but carried through all the way to modern day. With my backgrounds in literature and history, I did know a surface level of knowledge about the subject, but I feel more enlightened now having read this work.

Thank you NetGalley and Random House for the ARC of the work in exchange for an honest review.

So much history in one book was an amazing read! I enjoyed this tour through the history of writing as a subject and would recommend the to friends. The author presents the material as informative without being overbearing or tedious and I look forward to seeing more from the author in the future.

The Written World by Martin Puncher tells us of some of historys greatest works and how they impacted our world and history. This is a beautiful book aboit how literature has impacted the world. This is a great book for book lovers and historians alike. I loved it.

The Written World

The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization

by Martin Puchner
Random House Publishing Group - Random House

Random House

History

Pub Date 24 Oct 2017

I am reviewing a copy of The Written World through Random House and Netgalley:

In this book we learn of how stories, and the written world help shape the world, history and civilizations. Men Like Alexander of Macedonia in 336 B.C.E we’re impacted by literature. Alexander carried a copy of his favorite text the Iliad with him.

The Iliad did not start out as Litterature but as an oral story. The story is set around 1200 B.C.E. From stories written on Clay Tablets to Papyrus, and ancient libraries with texts sadly many lost to history The Written Word shows the place they all had and how they impact us even today.

There is no denying that litterature has had its place throughought history and across cultures. Stories help to shape people. Stories have a place in all Religions.

The first great novel in the world The Tale Of The Genji was written by a lady in waiting in the Japanese court around the year 1000 C.E. Sadly we do not know the name of the author.

The invention of Gutenberg’s printing pressbin the fifteenth centurynwoyld allow literature to be more widely spread, and not only available to the wealthiest.

This book takes us on a journey throughout the ages of litterature. If you are looking for a book that takes us on a journey through the history of the Written World thenThe Written World is just the ticket.

Five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!

As much as I highly enjoyed this book, whilst reading it, and as much as I felt I learned a vast amount of new knowledge, another review spoiled my reading experience of this, somewhat. Once completing this I read the other review, which pointed out that there were many problems with the facts stated within. I knew relatively little about these subjects and did not pick out these faults myself, so could not completely trust either author or reviewer. However, for that reason, I found I could not trust the validity of all my new-found knowledge garnered from within this book and second-guessed my previous enjoyment.

I followed Prof. Puchner course on EDX and this book was just the natural corollarium. It was interesting to get to reread something new and to crystallize previous knowledge, but if you haven't foollowed his course on World Literature I recommend it because it is one of the most interesting on the MOOC series.

Ho seguito il corso di World Literature del Prof. Puchner su EDX di cui questo libro non è che la summa theologica oltre ad avere nuovi capitoli, quindi é stato molto interessante anche perché c'erano nuovi capitoli e nuovi scrittori, se peró non avete seguito il suo corso fatelo perché é uno tra i migliori MOOC.

THANKS NETGALLEY FOR THE PREVIEW!

This is a great book for any fan of literature and/or history. The impact that the written word has had on our world is made fascinating by this book. It will help readers better understand how words have shaped our world into what it is today.

To say I loved The Written World: How Literature Shaped Civilization would be an understatement. I was drawn into this highly engaging book from the very first word. Martin Puchner is not only an academic of note, but a skilled storyteller. His passion for literature and his advocacy for its importance shine through in every page. The story he tells roams the world in both time and place. He makes a strong argument for literature as a driving force in politics, economics, and technology.
The Written World is part history, part travelogue, part TBR inspiration, and entirely compelling.

A nonfiction book that makes its way through human history via the medium of literature. Each of sixteen chapters focuses on a particular classic and shows how it both influenced and was influenced by contemporary events, from Homer's Odyssey giving Alexander the Great a hero to model himself after to The Communist Manifesto inspiring revolutions across the world. A subthread is the development of the technologies of literature itself – the inventions of the alphabet, paper, the printing press, ebooks, etc.

It's a pretty neat idea for a book! Unfortunately the execution is terrible. I started off being annoyed that Puchner never seems quite clear on what he means by the term 'literature'. He implies it only includes written works (in the Introduction he says, "It was only when storytelling intersected with writing that literature was born."), and yet many of the pieces he choses to focus on were primarily composed orally (The Odyssey and the Iliad, The Epic of Sunjata, the Popul Vuh, probably the Epic of Gilgamesh, certainly at least parts of One Thousand and One Nights). And yet there's never any discussion of what it means to go from an oral mode to a written one, a topic I was eagerly awaiting to see analyzed. It's just... never addressed beyond a passing mention here and there.

Okay, fine, I thought to myself, Puchner means 'literature' as in 'stories'. But that doesn't work either, since once again many of his choices don't tell any sort of narrative (Saint Paul's letters, Martin Luther's theses, Benjamin Franklin's 'Poor Richard's Almanac', Confucius's Analects, Mao's 'Little Red Book'). So what does Puchner mean by literature, the central organizing principle of his whole book? God alone knows.

My irritation with the book deepened when I got to Chapter Four, where Puchner claims credit for inventing the concept of the Axial Age: "It was only in the course of trying to understand the story of literature that I noticed a striking pattern in the teaching of the Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus. Living within a span of a few hundred years but without knowing of one another, these teachers revolutionized the world of ideas. Many of today’s philosophical and religious schools—Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, Western philosophy, and Christianity—were shaped by these charismatic teachers. It was almost as if in the five centuries before the Common Era, the world was waiting to be instructed, eager to learn new ways of thinking and being. But why? And what explained the emergence of these teachers?" Sure, dude, sure. You came up with this vastly original idea all on your own. (To be fair, if one choses to read through the endnotes, Puchner does cite Karl Jaspers, though he still insists his own version is ~so different~.)

He then proceeds to get basic information about the Buddha completely wrong. For example:
Some form of writing may have existed in India during the Buddha’s time (the so-called Indus Valley script may not have been a full writing system and remains undeciphered).
This sentence. I can't even. I almost stopped reading the book right here, it's so incredibly incorrect. It's like saying, "Thomas Jefferson may have been literate, but since we find no Latin engravings in his house, we can't be sure." Let me lay out the problems. The Buddha lived around 500BCE; the last known well-accepted use of the Indus script was in 1900BCE. That's a gap of nearly two millennia. The Indus script was used on the western edge of South Asia, in Pakistan and the Indian states of Gujarat and Haryana; the Buddha lived on the eastern edge, in Nepal. At minimum, they're 500 miles apart. There is no chance in hell the Indus script was remotely relevant to writing about the Buddha. And in fact, we don't need to guess at the script of the Buddha's time and place. It's called Brahmi and it's quite well attested – though Puchner doesn't once mention it. He does include a photo of an Indus seal, because why not waste more space on utterly irrelevant information.

Let's quickly go through the problems on the rest of this single paragraph:
What mattered above all were the age-old hymns and stories of the Vedas, which were transmitted orally by specially appointed Brahmans for whom remembering the Vedas was an obligation and a privilege.
Though the Vedas do have an important oral history, they were certainly written down by the time of the Buddha, and possibly as early as 1000BCE.
The oldest Indian epic, the Ramayana, was also orally composed and only later written down, much like Homeric epics.
The Mahabharata is generally considered to be the older of the two epics.

Despite my disillusionment at this point, I continued on with the book. And to be fair, I noticed many fewer mistakes! Though possibly because I know much less about Renaissance Germany or Soviet Russia than I do about Indian history. I did hit several problems again in the chapter on the Popul Vuh, the Mayan epic. To begin with, the chapter opens with a long dramatic scene recreating the Spanish conquistadores' capture of Atahualpa, the Incan emperor. Incan. Who lived in Peru, in South America. The Classic Mayan culture was based in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize – North America and a bit of Central America. This time Puchner is literally on the wrong continent.

Once he finally makes his way up to the Mayan homeland, he focuses his narration on Diego de Landa, a Spanish priest who did indeed write an important ethnography of the Mayans of the 1500s. The Classic Mayan Era was over by 950CE, introducing a discrepancy Puchner does not deign to acknowledge. Even aside from that small problem, Puchner describes Landa's writings multiple times as "an account [...] that has remained the primary source of information on Maya culture." This entirely ignores not only the Popul Vuh itself; but the multiple other Mayan codices that survived Spanish colonialism; the many Mayan writings carved on their pyramids, palaces, and stele, and painted on their pottery; their murals of war, sport, and history; the enormous archaeological record of their cities, technology, and diet; and, oh yeah, the fact that Mayan people are still around today.

Oh, my bad – Puchner does remember the Mayans still exist. Here's what he has to say about them:
"My journey began in the Lacandon jungle. A bus dropped me at the border of the Maya territory, where a beat-up truck picked me up at the side of the road. The village of several dozen huts was located in a clearing in the jungle. Everyone but me was dressed in what looked like long white nightgowns. Men and women both wore their black hair shoulder length (I thought of the shipwrecked sailor who had gone native), and most of them walked around barefoot, sometimes donning rubber boots."
That's it. That's literally the only mention of the modern Mayan people. (Puchner's in the area to learn about the Zapatista uprising, to which he devotes the rest of the chapter.) I'm so glad he spent ages detailing that and de Landa's biography instead of devoting any space at all to the contemporary persistence of Mayan beliefs, language, or rituals.

When I first read its blurb, I looked forward to the rest of The Written World. Unfortunately it's the closest I've come to hurling a book at the wall in a long, long time.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2118466663

Between the time I began reading this book and prepared to write the review, the subtitle changed. The original was "How Literature Shaped Civilization". That struck me as an interesting approach. I was disappointed as the author seemed to leave that idea behind quite quickly. While many of the stories herein are "literature", sections dealing with the power of alphabets and the printing press stretch the definition. The new sub-title does a much better job of describing the work as presented.


In the end, the primary title is the true focus. This is a series of stories about the power of the written word. "The Iliad", "Gilgamesh", the foundational texts of the major religions of the world, the first novel "Tales of Genji" (written by a Japanese woman), and the Mayan "Popul Vuh" join the works of Cervantes, Derek Walcott, and the storytellers of West Africa among others. Puchner gives us a breezy, conversational tour of all these works and the people who created them. It feels very much like sitting down with a good storyteller over a meal. The audience is fascinated but never overwhelmed.


If I have an issue with the book it grows from that same casual storytelling root. Puchner says in the afterword that his editor encouraged him to include more of his personal journey in the book. The author goes and visits as many of the places or authors as he can. At that point, no matter which sub-title you choose, the book tends to lose the thread for me. Long rambles about what he experienced in Turkey, or the Caribbean, or even Goethe's ramble through Sicily didn't offer much about stories shaping the world beyond the person experiencing the trip. For me, they served as a distracting "book within the book".


Martin Puchner creates a worldwide journey of exploration, showing the many ways that story has shaped humanity's life together. The easy, engaging style is a credit to any storyteller and a joy to read. If you love the written word, you will enjoy "The Written Word".

(Scheduled to be published Oct 4 at viewfromthephlipside.com)

This was easily one of my favourite books read so far in 2017 - I love a good subject history, and this was the perfect mix of academic + personal narrative. The subject matter dictates that there will be a lot of primary sources referenced, and being a stickler I made sure to go through the extensive bibliography at the end before even starting the book itself to get a sense for what the author would be referencing ... and I wasn't disappointed! The author divides the chapters chronologically and by primary text, and there is a wonderfully interesting narrative interspersed where Pucher discusses his own travels over the course of researching the book that really adds an interesting and humanistic narrative.

I found the most interesting chapters were the ones where I wasn't overly familiar with the text(s) being discussed - so for me it was the Tale of Genji and Buddhist tracts. It was because of those chapters in particular that I finished the book feeling like I'd really learned something new and interesting. I even found myself eyeing up some free ebooks of the Genji stories, and will probably take the plunge sometime in the coming months!