The Nature of Things

In the beginning was the word and the word created everything that came after. Today we live in The Written World , a civilization shaped by literature. In this fascinating book, Martin Puchner takes us on a trip through time to show us how the world that we know today was brought into being by story-tellers. The stories that they told were first shared through an oral tradition, handed down from one poet/singer, such as Homer, to another. The need to preserve the stories and pass them on helped lead to a system of writing and finally to methods of printing and distributing those printed texts. Inexorably, step by step, the first texts printed with wooden blocks have led us to digital "printing" and the Kindle on which I read this book. More than four thousand years of world literature have brought us to this. Puchner explores the ways in which literature has created our modern civilization by introducing us to the foundational texts and the visionaries that have been central...