As Martin Worthington reviews in The Conversation, The most detailed sections of the book are those on the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, where the author’s expertise and wide engagement with the sources is palpable. Topics that range beyond his expertise are served by well-chosen case studies.
Lots of interesting things – such as ancient and modern graffiti, or ancient scholars’ efforts to reconstruct even older forms of writing – fall outside of the book’s scope. But its range, from Uruk (modern day Warka, Iraq) in the 4th millennium BC to the present day, is enormous.
The director of the famed Bodleian Libraries at Oxford narrates the global history of the willful destruction—and surprising survival—of recorded knowledge over the past three millennia. Libraries and archives have been attacked since ancient times but have been especially threatened in the modern era.
Today the knowledge they safeguard faces purposeful destruction and willful neglect; deprived of funding, libraries are fighting for their very existence. Burning the Books recounts the history that brought us to this point.
Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the United Kingdom’s Windrush generation.
He examines both the motivations for these acts—political, religious, and cultural—and the broader themes that shape this history. He also looks at attempts to prevent and mitigate attacks on knowledge, exploring the efforts of librarians and archivists to preserve information, often risking their own lives in the process.
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