Peers' and readers' reviews

“So by what paths did we reach our present state of collective knowledge? This is the question Peter Burke sets out to answer. The result is a glittering cabinet of intellectual curiosities, a systematic study of the collecting, analysing, disseminating, storing, accessing, using and losing of knowledge in the western world from the mid-18th century to the ‘information overload’ of today…Burke, one of our foremost cultural historians, has long been driven to seek connections across time, place and intellectual field.”

             --Daniel Snowman, in History Today magazine

 

“This [book] is meant to be read as a vindication of historicism, as authentic testimony from a standpoint in the ‘stream of history’ (as Mannheim argued). But, since the historicist premise has to be accepted a priori for this conclusion to be vindicated and since too it really is unclear how ‘a history is a history’, it culminates in solipsism.”

 

             --Martin Davies, University of Leicester, in Reviews in History

 

“I would have welcomed an engagement with my actual arguments, whether in the form of counter-examples or that of alternative interpretations of the trends I discussed. Instead, Dr Davies discusses a different book…Such a book might well be interesting, but it would not be a social history of knowledge and it was not the book supposedly under review.”

 

             --Author Peter Burke's response in Reviews in History to Davies' review (above)

 

“Overall, it is an ambitious, fascinating, and exhaustive catalog of 250 years of knowledge, though it may be a bit dry to those not already interested in the topic…Burke excels at outlining broad trends in a comprehensible way, at broadening the scope of understanding of knowledge production to worlds beyond academia, and describing the interconnectedness between those worlds. It's doubtful that we will see another work quite like it.”

 

               --Rob, review from Goodreads.com

 

“The book does not disappoint the reader, if taken as a series of essays without a deeper purpose. Burke generally writes very well and supplies the reader a number of interesting details… [but we can] only admire the wealth of topics in history, sociology and economics knowledge without opportunity with some of them really acquainted in detail.”

                
                --Petr Špecián, translated from Czech, from Goodreads.com