A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq

This book is an interesting, albeit horrifying, read. Though I do concur with points made by other reviewers that A) the book is brief and B) it is dry, I freely admit I was rivetted. Blame the bibliophilia, but this book was more deeply distrubing than some Lovecraftian Cthulhu murmurs. The endless assault on literacy throughout the ages is chilling. Despite the brevity or dryness, this is an informative and fascinating book. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in literature, censorship, politics, culture, or other foundations of civilization. Awareness is key.

"A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern-day Iraq" by Fernando Baez. Translated by Alfred MacAdam. Atlas & Co., New York 2008. For some reason, this book is small, only 5 ½ inches wide by 7 ¼ inches high, by about one inch thick. The book is like a hard-bound paper back, making it easy to carry onto an airplane. Despite the book's small physical size, the book is packed with much information on the libraries of the worlds, ancient and modern. The author's book, "A Universal History Of The Destruction Of Books", is actually a concise, comprehensive history of the wars and raids waged by mankind over the many centuries of written history. The author is from Venezuela, so Fernando Baez wrote in Spanish and Alfred MacAdam translated the work into good English. If you query the WEB on Fernando Baez, you will find that he does not like the Iraq war and the occupation of Iraq. The author deals with libraries as collections of books, whether the books were in the form of cuneiform indentations on clay tablets, or papyrus or parchment or vellum, rolled up as scrolls or the more familiar (to moderns) rectangular collections of paper bound between two covers. The author's work is comprehensive, covering so many libraries that I, personally, did not even know existed, and ranging from continent to continent. Therefore, his book is a good reference work on the history of libraries, in particular, and mankind, in general. Size limitations, however, means that he scrimped a little here and there. For example, on page 103, he writes about the library at Lindisfarne, Northumberland, and states that Lindisfarne was "...founded by a monk from Iona around 635." The monk was St. Aidan (died 651), an Irishman born (probably) in Connaught. (One of my grandsons is Aodhan, which is the Irish spelling of the name.) The Library of Matthew Corvinus (1443-1490) is given just about a single page (from the bottom of page 136 to page 137), while the author, Marcus Tanner, has devoted an entire book (some 288 pages long) to it. See: "The Raven King: Matthias Corvinus and the Fate of His Lost Library", Yale University Press, 2008. Finally, I think it appropriate to mention that Quinnipiac University, Hamden, Connecticut, boasts of having the largest library, the Arnold Brenhard Library, dealing with the destruction of a people, "An Gorta Mor" ... "The Great Hunger", the famine that Ireland suffered through in the 19th Century.