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A review by nicturner89
Burning The Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack by Richard Ovenden
4.0
There is something terrible about those who burn books. To kill someone is to remove them from the present, to burn their books is to eradicate them from the past and to deny them to the future. The Nazi's did not just massacre European Jewry, they sought to destroy their culture and their history so that it could be forgotten and never resurrected.
There are many reasons to destroy documents. It is remarkable that in such a slim volume Ovenden covers so many of them. Sometimes it is politics, The British burned the Library of Congress to strike a blow at the young United States, the Germans burned the University Library at Louvain (twice) to assert their dominance over a conquered people. Henry VIII destroyed the monastic libraries of England out of a mixture of religious fervour and greed. Sometimes, as in the case of the Nazi's or the Serbian forces at Sarajevo, it is simply hatred. More benignly, as was recently the case with the Windrush landing cards in the UK, it is just bureaucratic malfeasance.
Yet this book is not just a litany of loss and destruction, (Although, how great would it be to read the missing verses of Sappho or the lost novel of Kafka!) it also raises interesting questions. To what extent should the author control their work? Was Betty Mackereth right to accede to Philip Larkin's request to shed his diaries, or was Max Brod right to ignore Kafka's demand that all his work be burned? When should we destroy records which reflect poorly on the living as Ted Hughes did of Sylvia Plath's journals and Jon Murray did with Byron's autobiography?
There are also questions for our modern era. How do we deal with the deluge of digital information? And should we allow Facebook and Google to become default archivists of our time?
What and how we record for posterity matters, whether is commentaries on the gospels or a list of passengers on a ship and for raising these issues this excellent little book is worth reading.
There are many reasons to destroy documents. It is remarkable that in such a slim volume Ovenden covers so many of them. Sometimes it is politics, The British burned the Library of Congress to strike a blow at the young United States, the Germans burned the University Library at Louvain (twice) to assert their dominance over a conquered people. Henry VIII destroyed the monastic libraries of England out of a mixture of religious fervour and greed. Sometimes, as in the case of the Nazi's or the Serbian forces at Sarajevo, it is simply hatred. More benignly, as was recently the case with the Windrush landing cards in the UK, it is just bureaucratic malfeasance.
Yet this book is not just a litany of loss and destruction, (Although, how great would it be to read the missing verses of Sappho or the lost novel of Kafka!) it also raises interesting questions. To what extent should the author control their work? Was Betty Mackereth right to accede to Philip Larkin's request to shed his diaries, or was Max Brod right to ignore Kafka's demand that all his work be burned? When should we destroy records which reflect poorly on the living as Ted Hughes did of Sylvia Plath's journals and Jon Murray did with Byron's autobiography?
There are also questions for our modern era. How do we deal with the deluge of digital information? And should we allow Facebook and Google to become default archivists of our time?
What and how we record for posterity matters, whether is commentaries on the gospels or a list of passengers on a ship and for raising these issues this excellent little book is worth reading.