This book by Martin Puchner is excellent. It is an epic journey through the ages of storytelling, writing, and printing and how people have used the written word to share stories, disseminate ideas, generate protests, and suppress.
The approach is excellent and follows a chronological and technological sequence. Marrying the two to create a composite story would have been a challenge but he succeeded! Kudos to him.
We have seen how storytelling evolved from inscriptions on walls (Gilgamesh) to the written word, to books, to simple printing (China), and to the Gutenberg press.
We also see how people have used these technologies for their benefit.
I am only surprised by the almost total neglect of the impact of the internet on writing and dissemination.
Martin Puchner's book is readable and to his credit, he has included 'foundation stories' from every continent. ( )

O mundo da escrita nos conduz a uma viagem maravilhosa pelo tempo e pelo globo, por meio de dezesseis textos fundamentais, selecionados dentre 4 mil anos de literatura mundial. É assim que conhecemos a sra. Murasaki, autora do primeiro grande romance da história universal; as aventuras de Miguel de Cervantes ao enfrentar piratas ― tanto os que atuam no mar como os literários ―; e os artesãos da linguagem do épico oral Sundiata na África Ocidental. Também aprendemos como Goethe descobriu a literatura mundial na Sicília, passamos mil e uma noites com Sherazade, acompanhamos a difusão do Manifesto Comunista e a batalha dos livros na América espanhola.

Thank you, Dr. Puchner! The joy you evidently experienced researching and writing "The Written World..." makes for a very enjoyable and informative read. ( )

Whether you are looking at your screen, a paper or an advert in the underground almost all we see around us has words in some form or other. Even the TV news has a ticker tape of other headlines now running underneath the presenter. This technology of the written word has shaped cultures through the ages as much as cultures have shaped language and the written world.

Beginning with Alexander and his pillow book, Puchner takes us from the first marks pressed into clay, the invention of vellum, paper and inks that were first made into codex's or books as we now call them. Most importantly though was the stories, messages and words that were written on them. These words and works of literature from the epic classics to the political tracts and the religious texts, they have shaped the way people think, cause revolutions and inspired people to fight for the causes they believe in.

A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on. ― Terry Pratchett

That power of language is still with us today, as can be seen from modern day politics… This is an interesting book and Puchner has done pretty well to distil the vast magnitude of world literature and the effects that it has had around the world and bring it in between the covers of this book. It has a really helpful timeline at the beginning with locations where each chapter of our literary journey was started and the text is enhanced with images of some of the books he mentions in the text. It is an enjoyable read, the only flaw being that it cannot go into too much depth to make the book manageable, however, there is a large reference section though for those that want to discover more about our shared literary legacy. ( )

A book about the top works of world literature, is there anything more interesting? On this forum that is of course a rhetorical question. So, it was with a certain eagerness that I started this book, encouraged by the subtitle: "How literature shapes history”. Unfortunately, Puchner does not quite live up to the expectations.
Of course, those who are not well introduced in world literature will learn quite a bit: Puchner gives a nice summary of the basic stories (the Iliad, the Gilgamesh story, the Old Testament stories, etc.), explains how they were composed and how they were laid out in writing after an initial oral tradition. And he also makes a creditable attempt to open up the field of vision: the texts of Benjamin Franklin or Johan Goethe are also covered, and he also includes Japanese, West African and Central American stories in his studies. In particular, he shows what an important role they have played in the world view of all those cultures and how they have inspired certain peoples and individuals to great deeds. The common thread is always that it concerns "foundational texts".
That perspective ("foundational texts") is certainly interesting, and applies to many of the cited works, but not to all of them. For example, the entertaining and fascinating collection "1001 nights" has never been an inspiration model for medieval Islamic society. And the "Don Quixote" certainly is an iconic text, but it was never foundational for Spanish or West European people. Puchner’s book therefore lacks some homogeneity.
And then there are all those other defects. It all stays a bit superficial: Puchner limits himself to the main lines. Regularly disturbing errors are made, such as the statement that Alexander the Great always had the Iliad under his sleeping pillow (at that time there were no physical books, and I have my doubts about that sleeping pillow). In the chapter about Buddha, Confucius, Socrates and Jesus, he literally reproduces the Axial theory of Karl Jaspers, without the slightest mention of his source.
And what particularly bothered me: Puchner sketches the historical context of the basic texts largely on the basis of the classic legends that have been handed down. For example, he bases Alexander's life (and his dealings with the Iliad) entirely on the classical mythical stories about Alexander himself. It seems to me, this is all incomprehensibly uncritical for a Harvard professor.
So all in all this is an interesting book, certainly, but with a few ugly flaws. ( )