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homodachi 's review for:
The Chinese Typewriter: A History
by Thomas S. Mullaney
This book is trying to be two things at once: a broadly approachable text with a conversational tone, and a scholarly history whose sentences cannot be debunked by other academics. The result is a text where each topic is given far too many words than it merits, yet the context/discussion provided is shallow.
The paragraphs are consistently the longest I’ve ever seen in a published work. Every idea is exhaustingly over-explained. It would have benefited from having a merciless editor, but my guess is that’s not really “done” in academia.
Also, to capture the zeitgeist around the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the author turned to the primary source of the comments section of a Slashdot article. Slashdot! This book was published in 2017!
The paragraphs are consistently the longest I’ve ever seen in a published work. Every idea is exhaustingly over-explained. It would have benefited from having a merciless editor, but my guess is that’s not really “done” in academia.
Also, to capture the zeitgeist around the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the author turned to the primary source of the comments section of a Slashdot article. Slashdot! This book was published in 2017!