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A review by alexbrownbooks
Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge by Richard Ovenden
4.0
Ovenden's prose is workmanlike but the information is SO important, and the overall plea for society to recognize the significance of libraries, archives, and information preservation is conveyed with obvious fervency. And I agree! Fund libraries!
A few special mentions:
- "Sarajevo Mon Amour," the chapter on the targeted destruction of the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Serbian militia in 1992. It honestly brought me to tears.
- Sir Thomas Bodley, who (re)founded the Bodleian library, and disinherited his own family in order to endow it. A tip of the hat to you, sir.
- Ted Hughes. I have always felt that he was kind of the worst, and this book did not convince me otherwise. Team Sylvia Plath allllll the way.
Oh, I forgot to add one critical comment: even though the book did delve into the issues of "migrated archives" and other situations where items pertinent to a particular state or culture's selfhood are removed to a different state (possibly in perpetuity), I found Ovenden's commentary on Britain's role in this area to be unsatisfying in the extreme. As the head of the Bodleian, it is possible that he needed to choose his words with care, but avoiding that more critical lens on his own library's holdings still felt like an uncomfortable gap in the narrative, given Britain's role on the world stage as major empire builder and its known activities of appropriation.
A few special mentions:
- "Sarajevo Mon Amour," the chapter on the targeted destruction of the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Serbian militia in 1992. It honestly brought me to tears.
- Sir Thomas Bodley, who (re)founded the Bodleian library, and disinherited his own family in order to endow it. A tip of the hat to you, sir.
- Ted Hughes. I have always felt that he was kind of the worst, and this book did not convince me otherwise. Team Sylvia Plath allllll the way.
Oh, I forgot to add one critical comment: even though the book did delve into the issues of "migrated archives" and other situations where items pertinent to a particular state or culture's selfhood are removed to a different state (possibly in perpetuity), I found Ovenden's commentary on Britain's role in this area to be unsatisfying in the extreme. As the head of the Bodleian, it is possible that he needed to choose his words with care, but avoiding that more critical lens on his own library's holdings still felt like an uncomfortable gap in the narrative, given Britain's role on the world stage as major empire builder and its known activities of appropriation.