DECEMBER 2020 - AudioFile
Julia Winwood's narrative tone is that of a well-done lecture, with emphasis on interesting ideas and intriguing facts. She can bring a hint of suspense to the invention of the ring binder and make listeners smile as they hear a poem on alphabetical order. Judith Flanders's history of ordering systems and the developments that made them necessary is thoughtful but a bit esoteric. Her account of the roots of the written word and libraries focuses on such things as indexes, concordances, and card catalogues. Early on, the origins of the word "abracadabra" in the Roman alphabet can seem magical as delivered in Winwood's voice. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
From the Publisher
"Fascinating... A Place for Everything rewards us with a fresh take on our quest to stockpile knowledge. It feels particularly relevant now that search engines are rendering old ways of organizing information obsolete...That we have acquired so much knowledge is astounding; that we have devised ways to find what we need to know quickly is what merits this original and impressive book."—New York Times
"Fascinating . . . truly revelatory"—Wall Street Journal
"One of the many fascinations of Judith Flanders's book is that it reveals what a weird, unlikely creation the alphabet is...an intriguing history not just of alphabetical order but of the human need for both pattern and intellectual efficiency."—Guardian
"A charming repository of idiosyncrasy, a love letter to literacy that rightly delights in alphabetisation's exceptions as much as its rules."—Financial Times
“This is an utterly charming book, packed with engrossing details.”—The Times (UK)
"For readers who love language or armchair historians interested in the evolution of linguistics, this is catnip. For the mildly curious, it's accessible, narratively adventurous, and surprisingly insightful about how the alphabet marks us all in some way...A rich cultural and linguistic history."—Kirkus
"A Place for Everything presents itself as a history of alphabetical order, but in fact it is much more than that. Rather, as the title suggests, it offers something like a general history of the various ways humans have sorted and filed the world around them."—The Spectator
"A library and academic essential rather than a catchpenny popular read (that, by the way, is a compliment)."—The Times of London
"Quirky and compelling... [Flanders] is a meticulous historian with a taste for the offbeat; the story of alphabetical order suits her well."—Dan Jones, Sunday Times (UK)
"Surprising and copiously researched."—Times Literary Supplement
"Flanders is one of our outstanding popular historians.... [A Place for Everything] is an exemplar of the form on which it focuses."—The Critic
"Judith Flanders has a knack for making odd subjects accessible."—i
“Flanders is especially good in discussing when and why alphabetical order was not used, or was resisted, even after it was available....The prose is engaging [and] the examples are to the point[.]” —Jack Lynch, Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America
DECEMBER 2020 - AudioFile
Julia Winwood's narrative tone is that of a well-done lecture, with emphasis on interesting ideas and intriguing facts. She can bring a hint of suspense to the invention of the ring binder and make listeners smile as they hear a poem on alphabetical order. Judith Flanders's history of ordering systems and the developments that made them necessary is thoughtful but a bit esoteric. Her account of the roots of the written word and libraries focuses on such things as indexes, concordances, and card catalogues. Early on, the origins of the word "abracadabra" in the Roman alphabet can seem magical as delivered in Winwood's voice. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2020-08-19
The centurieslong history of the evolution of the alphabet as we know it.
In her latest, social historian and novelist Flanders tackles the curious history of alphabetical order. The author creates a fitting structure for the book, proceeding from “A Is for Antiquity” to “Y Is for Y2K” (not every letter gets its own chapter). Flanders moves from a discussion of language in the classical world all the way to the 21st century, with hypertext and other breakthroughs in language acquisition and absorption. It might seem like a relatively dull subject, but the author’s prose is consistently engaging. “Writing is powerful because it transcends time,” she writes, “and because it creates an artificial memory, or store of knowledge, a memory that can be located physically, be it on clay tablets, on walls, on stone, on bronze, papyrus, parchment or paper.” Flanders introduces the Benedictine monks and their influential work in their monasteries, and after spending several chapters on the Middle Ages, she introduces the birth of printing as well as movable type and the first card catalogs. Flanders admits that while many history buffs think that alphabetization “followed hard on the heels of printing…the reality was less tidy, as reality usually is.” Fascinating character sketches further the story, among them vibrant portraits of Samuel Pepys, John Locke, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but we should all hail librarians (“the institutional memory of their libraries”) as the unsung heroes of this history. Flanders often points out that many of the advances in the organizing principles of the alphabet have been the result of constant experimentation rather than lightning-strike breakthroughs. For readers who love language or armchair historians interested in the evolution of linguistics, this is catnip. For the mildly curious, it’s accessible, narratively adventurous, and surprisingly insightful about how the alphabet marks us all in some way.
A rich cultural and linguistic history.
