Overview

A captivating journey through interconnected history and innovative ideas that reveal the surprising links shaping our modern world. In The Knowledge Web, James Burke, the bestselling author and host of television’s Connections series, takes us on a fascinating tour through the interlocking threads of knowledge running through Western history. Displaying mesmerizing flights of fancy, he shows how seemingly unrelated ideas and innovations bounce off one another, spinning a vast, interactive web on which everything is connected to everything else: Carmen leads to the theory of relativity, champagne bottling links to wallpaper design, Joan of Arc connects through vaudeville to Buffalo Bill. Illustrating his open, connective theme in the form of a journey across a web, Burke breaks down complex concepts, offering information in a manner accessible to anybody—high school graduates and PhD holders alike. The journey touches almost two hundred interlinked points in the history of knowledge, ultimately ending where it begins. At once amusing and instructing, The Knowledge Web heightens our awareness of our interdependence—with one another and with the past. Only by understanding the interrelated nature of the modern world can we hope to identify complex patterns of change and direct the process of innovation to the common good.

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9780684859354

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Reviews

Bill Gates<p>James Burke is a favorite author of mine.<p>

Back playing his theme music - the process by which new ideas emerge is serendipitous and interactive - is the hugely entertaining Burke (The Pinball Effect, 1996, etc.). He's off on another of his joyrides, following the often bizarre pathways that lead from one idea to another, following like a bloodhound the threads that link events and notions and personalities. And he doesn't just list the things passing strange before his purview, he stops to examine them and deliver a smart little explication. He's not just amused to learn that the Magnetico-Electrico Celestial Bed, wherein the administrations of shocks to the participants was said to ensure immediate conception, can be found on the road to the cornflake, he wants readers to know why. And it's pure pleasure to read as he unravels the skein knotting the pugnacious father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, to the equally pugnacious antivivisectionists, and a thirty-three-year-old married Englishwoman with a hidden past and the habit of wearing no underwear to, 211 pages later, the Elgin marbles. Burke again makes use of gateways in his narrative, a system of numeric codes that link distant strands within the text into a literary subspace, allowing readers to skip about throughout the book, as if Burke's caperings aren't entertainment enough, though it does drive home why Burke is so pleased that the word web has gained such currency. There are vague rumblings at the beginning of this book about a new system of knowledge gathering, sowing democracy and enfranchising the uneducated in its wake, that Burke will introduce, in which semi-intelligent computer software helps weed through the information glut unleashed by the Internet. That would suggest undermining the very serendipity and interactivity that enthralls him so, and he wisely doesn't mention it again after the introduction. Burke is in a league alone when it comes to freewheeling intellectual curiosity and mapping nature's strange designs. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

James Burke is the author of several bestselling books, including Circles, American Connections, and The Knowledge Web. He is a monthly columnist at Scientific American and also serves as director, writer, and host of the television series Connections 3 on The Learning Channel. He is the founder of the James Burke Institute for Innovation in Education, whose flagship project, the Knowledge Web, an interactive website, was recently launched. He lives in London.

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