The Information

I read James Gleick's The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood on my Kindle ap for iPad so consequently working my way through it I had no intuitive sense of when I was approaching the end of the main narrative and the beginning of the footnotes. When I reached the end, I was surprised and saddened. That five percent reflects the fact that the execution of the conclusion is a bit off and 95 percent reflects the fact that it's a great book I was disappointed to see end. The basic aim, fully achieved, is to situate the miraculous PC revolution of the past thirty years to a longer series of ongoing revolutions in the sphere of "information" dating back to the telephone, the telegraph, and beyond. Sporadic narrative tendrils bring you to ancient times and pre-colonization Africa, but the core focus is on the post-Morse development of modern means of storing and transmitting information and how it is we came to understand that there is such a thing.

As a bad speller, I can't help but like this glimpse at the good old days before the standardization of English spelling:

In fact, few had any concept of "spelling"—the idea that each word, when written, should take a particular predetermined form of letters. The word cony (rabbit) appeared variously as conny, conye, conie, connie, coni, cuny, cunny, and cunnie in a single 1591 pamphlet. Others spelled it differently. And for that matter Cawdrey himself, on the title page of his book for "teaching the true writing," wrote wordes in one sentence and words in the next.

For a critical and overly literal assessment, see Geoffrey Nunberg in The New York Times. If you like good books on technical and historical subjects, read the book.