Amazon.com
How is vivisection related to Stonehenge? It might take a few leaps of history, but you'll find the answer in The Knowledge Web, another of science historian James Burke's compelling collections of circular narratives that have informed and inspired astute readers for years. Best known for his outstanding documentary series Connections, Burke has a genius for unraveling complex threads of history and sharing with us the remarkable coincidences and contingencies that built our modern world. In The Knowledge Web he shows us how the rapid flow of information engenders greater possibilities for the kinds of chance meetings that drive progress.
Burke uses a very neat trick that both demonstrates the potential of hypertext and makes a more pleasurable reading experience. When mentioning certain key figures or events, he includes a footnote that points the reader not to the bottom of the page or the end of the book, but to another point in the text where the figure or event comes into play again. Many other writers would find this impossible to pull off, but Burke's style is perfectly suited for these jumps; if anything, his major theme of interconnectedness is driven home in a fresh new way. Whether or not you're a fan of Burke's unique style, The Knowledge Web will delight and amaze you with its visions of the delicacy of history and the many paths the past must take to reach the future. --Rob Lightner
From Publishers Weekly
Continuing in the vein of The Pinball Effect, his unconventional history of technological change, Burke offers 20 new historical "story lines" that attempt to demonstrate the interactive, often serendipitous connections among ideas, events, people and innovations. His style matches his subject as he skips from one topic to another, moving at the speed of hypertext. The chapter on feedback systems hops from neural networksAcomputers that simulate the human brain's workingsAto studies of the physiology of animal emotion, Cyrus Field's pioneering transatlantic telephone cable in 1857 and thence to Napoleon, James Watt, Arts and Crafts movement leader William Morris and Theosophist Annie Besant. Burke always risks being charged with carrying on an intellectual parlor game that trivializes the history of science and invention, of stretching the maxim "everything is interconnected" to the point of meaninglessness. But because his material is intrinsically interesting and because Burke is a superb raconteur, his maverick guide to the byways of Western civilization is entertaining when consumed in small segments. This manic, associative tour of the cultural underpinnings of technological advancement fast, sexy and packed with information; but it's ultimately shapeless and provides little in the way of deeper understanding. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Flights of fancy from a sci-tech expert, e.g., what do Buffalo Bill Cody and the Spanish Inquisition have in common?Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Burke, familiar to PBS watchers from series like Connections, is back, practicing what he preached in The Axemaker's Gift (1995). The Knowledge Web is Burke's effort to replicate, in linear form, the sort of "webbed" knowledge available to Internet surfers. Its 20 chapters trace often serendipitous developments of particular products or scientific discoveries: the sort of narratives Burke watchers have seen many times. In this book, however, the author makes intersections explicit: a person--say, Cyrus Field or Annie Besant--or idea that appears several times in the book is a "gateway," and each reference is marked with the other places in the book where the same person or idea comes up again. A curious reader who wants to explore the gateway can stop reading about the telegraph and switch to a chapter on warships or instant coffee. With "twenty different journeys across the great web of change" and 142 gateways, Burke offers readers "at least 142 different ways" to read his book. Full of useful information and an interesting experiment in "webbed" knowledge. Mary Carroll
From Kirkus Reviews
Back playing his theme musicthe process by which new ideas emerge is serendipitous and interactive''is the hugely entertaining Burke (The Pinball Effect, 1996, etc.). Hes off on another of his joyrides, following the often bizarre pathways that lead from one idea to another, following like a bloodhound the threads that link events and notions and personalities. And he doesn't just list the things passing strange before his purview, he stops to examine them and deliver a smart little explication. Hes not just amused to learn that the Magnetico-Electrico Celestial Bed, wherein the administrations of shocks to the participants was said to ``ensure immediate conception,'' can be found on the road to the cornflake, he wants readers to know why. And its pure pleasure to read as he unravels the skein knotting the pugnacious father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, to the equally pugnacious antivivisectionists, and ``a thirty-three-year-old married Englishwoman with a hidden past and the habit of wearing no underwear'' to, 211 pages later, the Elgin marbles. Burke again makes use of ``gateways'' in his narrative, a system of numeric codes that link distant strands within the text into a literary subspace, allowing readers to skip about throughout the book, as if Burke's caperings aren't entertainment enough, though it does drive home why Burke is so pleased that the word ``web'' has gained such currency. There are vague rumblings at the beginning of this book about a new system of knowledge gathering, sowing democracy and enfranchising the uneducated in its wake, that Burke will introduce, in which semi-intelligent computer software helps weed through the information glut unleashed by the Internet. That would suggest undermining the very serendipity and interactivity that enthralls him so, and he wisely doesn't mention it again after the introduction. Burke is in a league alone when it comes to freewheeling intellectual curiosity and mapping nature's strange designs. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
Bill Gates James Burke is a favorite author of mine.
Book Description
In The Knowledge Web, James Burke, the bestselling author and host of television's Connections series, takes us on a fascinating tour through the interlocking threads of knowledge running through Western history. Displaying mesmerizing flights of fancy, he shows how seemingly unrelated ideas and innovations bounce off one another, spinning a vast, interactive web on which everything is connected to everything else: Carmen leads to the theory of relativity, champagne bottling links to wallpaper design, Joan of Arc connects through vaudeville to Buffalo Bill. Illustrating his open, connective theme in the form of a journey across a web, Burke breaks down complex concepts, offering information in a manner accessible to anybody -- high school graduates and Ph.D. holders alike. The journey touches almost two hundred interlinked points in the history of knowledge, ultimately ending where it begins. At once amusing and instructing, The Knowledge Web heightens our awareness of our interdependence -- with one another and with the past. Only by understanding the interrelated nature of the modern world can we hope to identify complex patterns of change and direct the process of innovation to the common good.
Book Info
Takes a tour through the interlocking threads of knowledge running through Western history. Breaks down complex concepts, offering information in a manner accessible to anybody. Touches almost two hundred interlinked points in the history of knowledge, ultimately ending where it begins. Softcover. DLC: Technology--History.
Card catalog description
In The Knowledge Web, James Burke takes us on a fascinating tour through the interlocking threads of knowledge running through Western history. Displaying mesmerizing flights of fancy, he shows how seemingly unrelated ideas and innovations bounce off one another, spinning a vast, interactive web on which everything is connected to everything else: Carmen leads to the theory of relativity, champagne bottling links to wallpaper design, Joan of Arc connects through vaudeville to Buffalo Bill. Illustrating his open, connective theme in the form of a journey across the web, Burke breaks down complex concepts, offering information in a manner accessible to anybody - high school graduates and Ph.D. holders alike.
About the Author
James Burke has written seven books, including the bestselling Connections and The Day the Universe Changed. He contributes a monthly column to Scientific American and serves as director, writer and host of the television series Connections 3, which airs on the Learning Channel. He lives in England, France and airplanes.
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