In this exhilarating celebration of human ingenuity and perseverance--published all around the world--a trailblazing Italian scholar sifts through our cult...
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-ISBN-10:
125086299X
ISBN-13:
9781250862990
Publisher
Picador USA
Dimensions
8.20 X 5.30 X 0.70 inches
Language
English
In this exhilarating celebration of human ingenuity and perseverance--published all around the world--a trailblazing Italian scholar sifts through our cultural and social behavior in search of the origins of our greatest invention: writing.
The L where a tabletop meets the legs, the T between double doors, the D of an armchair's oval backrest--all around us is an alphabet in things. But how did these shapes make it onto the page, never mind form complex structures such as this sentence? In The Greatest Invention, Silvia Ferrara takes a profound look at how--and how many times--human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language, traveling back and forth in time and all across the globe to Mesopotamia, Crete, China, Egypt, Central America, Easter Island, and beyond. With Ferrara as our guide, we examine the enigmas of undeciphered scripts, including famous cases like the Phaistos Disk and the Voynich Manuscript; we touch the knotted, colored strings of the Inca quipu; we study the turtle shells and ox scapulae that bear the earliest Chinese inscriptions; we watch in awe as Sequoyah single-handedly invents a script for the Cherokee language; and we venture to the cutting edge of decipherment, in which high-powered laser scanners bring tears to an engineer's eye. A code-cracking tour around the globe, The Greatest Invention chronicles a previously uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research, and a faint, fleeting glimpse of writing's future.ISBN-10
:125086299X
ISBN-13
:9781250862990
Publisher
:Picador USA
Publication date
: 28 Feb, 2023
Category
Sub-Category
Format
:PAPERBACK
Language
:English
Reading Level
: All
No. of Units
:1
Dimension
: 8.20 X 5.30 X 0.70 inches
Weight
:249 g
"Ferrara says she wrote the book the way she talks to friends over dinner, and that's exactly how it reads. Instead of telling a chronological history of writing, she moves freely from script to script, island to island . . . She is constantly by our side, prodding us with questions, offering speculations, reporting on exciting discoveries . . . . her book doubles as a manifesto for collaborative research." --Martin Puchner, The New York Times Book Review
"In Silvia Ferrara's conception of it, writing is a fragile object, nurtured over many phases of human development . . . The Greatest Invention is a celebration not of achievements, but of moments of illumination and 'the most important thing in the world: our desire to be understood.'" --Lydia Wilson, The Times Literary SupplementCopyright © 2024. Boganto.com. All Rights Reserved (Powered By ESapiens LLP)