All Facts Considered: The Essential Library of Inessential Knowledge - Hardcover

Malesky, Kee

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0470559659 ISBN 13: 9780470559659

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, 2010

Synopsis

For the bestselling miscellany market, an NPR librarian′s compendium of fascinating facts on history, science, and the arts

How much water do the Great Lakes contain? Who were the first and last men killed in the Civil War? How long is a New York minute? What are the lost plays of Shakespeare? What building did Elvis leave last? Get the answers to these and countless other vexing questions in a All Facts Considered. Guaranteed to enlighten even the most seasoned trivia buff, this treasure trove of "who knew?" factoids spans a wide range of intriguing subjects.

• Written by noted NPR librarian Kee Malesky, whom Scott Simon has called the "source of all human knowledge"
• Answers questions on history, natural history, science, religion, language, and the arts
• Packed with valuable nuggets of information, from the useful to the downright bizarre

The perfect gift for every inquiring mind that wants to know, All Facts Considered will put you at the center of the conversation as you show off your essential store of inessential yet irresistible knowledge.

About this title

From the Back Cover

How much junk is in space? What are the lost plays of Shakespeare?

When was the Sack of Rome? How long is a New York minute?

What building did Elvis last leave?

Get the answers to these and countless other vexing questions in All Facts Considered. Noted NPR librarian Kee Malesky presents a compendium of fascinating facts on intriguing subjects ranging from history and science to the arts, packing every page with valuable nuggets of information mined over her twenty–six–year career everything from the useful to the downright bizarre.

"There isn′t a journalist born who hasn′t been tempted to as they say not let the facts get in the way of a good story.?And that is the genius of Kee Malesky.?Inquire about a fact, and she produces a tale, as seductive as it is accurate. Sacred cows, plastic soup, star–crossed lovers, the roots of red hair.?Within these pages you will be treated to a taste of the vast sweep of all things Kee something we at NPR have long savored simply by dialing the number for ′Library, Reference.′"
Renee Montagne, co–host of NPR′s Morning Edition

"Kee Malesky enshrines the humble fact in a way that is both instructive and enchanting."
Daniel Schorr, NPR Senior News Analyst

"Every one of us ′media figures′ who appears smart or well prepared in public has somebody standing behind the curtains, knowledge at the ready, covering for our ignorance like Marni Nixon singing for Natalie Wood. My knowledge–double is Kee Malesky, who makes me and everybody else at NPR sound brighter than we are.?With this book, a little memorization, and some practice on your knowing, slightly world–weary tone, you too will seem smarter.?But not, ever, as smart as she is."
Peter Sagal, host of the NPR news quiz show Wait Wait . . . Don′t Tell Me!

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

All Facts Considered: The Essential Library of Inessential Knowledge

By Kee Malesky

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-55965-9

Chapter One

Battles and Bigwigs

Ancient and Modern, Sacred and Civil History

The Start of History

History begins with writing, with the ability to document events, traditions, laws, and myths and to record and preserve them for posterity. Homo sapiens developed spoken language tens of thousands of years ago, but writing—the inscribing of characters or signs with an instrument on a surface to represent language and to communicate or record information —is a much more recent achievement. The earliest examples of writing are from Sumer and Egypt, with China and Central America developing their systems a bit later.

First, people needed counting devices (such as sticks, pebbles, or clay tokens) to keep track of commercial transactions and personal possessions. These led to systems of simple visual symbols to express ideas or objects; these are called pictograms. Next, logograms evolved; these represented specific words, but they could not easily express abstract concepts.

Around 3300 BCE, the Sumerians developed the first phonetic system by using a word symbol to stand for other words that had a similar sound but were difficult to represent with a picture symbol. The final step was the development of individual alphabetic characters, each of which represents a single sound. In The Book before Printing, David Diringer writes, "Alphabetic writing is the last, the most highly developed, the most convenient and the most easily adaptable system of writing."

Ancient Crossroads

Persia (which changed its name to Iran in 1935) was one of the world's first civilizations; it has evidence of Neolithic Aryan (peoples who spoke Indo-European languages) settlements from nearly ten thousand years ago. Persians are a non-Arab people who migrated from central Asia. According to National Geographic, "If you draw lines from the Mediterranean to Beijing or Beijing to Cairo or Paris to Delhi, they all pass through Iran, which straddles a region where East meets West. Over 26 centuries, a blending of the hemispheres has been going on here—trade, cultural interchange, friction—with Iran smack in the middle." The Elamites established the first known Persian dynasty in the third millennium BCE. Another Aryan people, the Medes (the ancestors of the Kurds of today), created a unified empire in the northwestern part of that region around 625 BCE. Cyrus the Great, who issued what some consider the world's first declaration of human rights, overthrew the Medes and established the Achaemenid Empire, expanding Persian control and influence from Egypt to India—making it one of the largest empires in history. His descendants, Darius and his son Xerxes, invaded Greece but were defeated and expelled from Europe in 479 BCE.

In the next century, Alexander the Great conquered Persia and ended the Achaemenid dynasty. After about a hundred years of Alexander's Seleucid Empire, the Parthian and Sassanid dynasties reestablished Persian rule until the Arab invasion in the seventh century CE. The Persians, the Kurds, the Turks, and others then converted to Islam.

The Rome of China

The story of Xi'an, one of the oldest cities in China, began long before cities were invented: archaeologists have discovered fossils of early Homo erectus nearby that may be a million years old, and there was a Neolithic village in the area at least eight thousand years ago. Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, selected Xi ' an for his capital in the third century BCE, and it rivaled such Western cities as Rome and Athens.

In 1974, parts of Qin's burial complex (the largest mausoleum ever discovered) were identified and excavated. Eight thousand life-sized clay figures, known as the Terra Cotta Warriors and Horses, were found along with actual chariots, weapons, armor, and other funerary art. Their role was to guard Qin in the afterlife and allow him to rule the universe from his tomb. The site also included figures of acrobats and musicians whose role was to provide eternal entertainment for the emperor.

Throughout the centuries, thirteen Chinese dynasties established their primary centers at Xi'an, and it became the eastern terminus of the Silk Road, the network of trade routes that linked the East with the West.

The Face of Amateur Archaeology

Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890) was a German businessman and an amateur archaeologist who made his fortune speculating in the U.S. stock market and serving as a military contractor during the Crimean War. An autodidact with a romantic attachment to the ancient world, he wanted to prove the historicity of Homer's Iliad by finding the location of Troy—this was when most people thought the Trojan War was merely a legend.

In 1871, he began excavating around Hissarlik in Turkey. Because scientific technique had not been developed yet for archaeological fieldwork, Schliemann destroyed several incarnations of Troy in his attempts to find Priam's city. His wife was photographed wearing the "jewels of Helen," although the treasures he found there probably date back to well before Homeric Troy.

Schliemann did find the location of Troy, however, and subsequent excavations have uncovered evidence of nine iterations of that city, including one level that revealed a collapsed and burned fortification.

Working next in Mycenae, Schliemann excavated shaft graves near the Lion Gate and located the remains of several chieftains wearing golden masks. Schliemann is said to have sent this telegram to the king of Greece: "Today I gazed upon the face of Agamemnon." The text of the message is probably apocryphal, and the face was not Agamemnon's. The tombs were hundreds of years older than the era of the Trojan War, which probably occurred between 1300 and 1200 BCE.

Did Schliemann do more harm than good? Was he just a self-promoting embellisher, a looter and a smuggler, or did he go so far as to fabricate some artifacts? The debate on his motives and accomplishments continues, as does the archaeological work at Troy and Mycenae.

Pristine Civilization

The Olmecs of southern Mexico are often called the Sumerians of the New World because they are probably the oldest culture in Mesoamerica—a pristine civilization (one of a handful of ancient societies in the world that developed independently of any known preexisting cultures). The name Olmec means "rubber people" in the Aztec language, but it is not known what name these people called themselves. They flourished in the Veracruz and Tabasco region near the Gulf of Mexico from about 1200 to 400 BCE and seem to have developed a sophisticated and diverse economy.

Archaeologists have discovered more than a dozen Olmec giant stone heads—the first monumental sculpture in this hemisphere. The Olmec may also have been the originators of the Mesoamerican ball game, the precursor of the volleyball-like Aztec game called ulama or ullamaliztli, which is still played today; rubber balls, figurines of ball players, and remains of playing courts have been unearthed in Olmec areas.

Debate continues on whether the Olmec were a "mother culture," one that strongly influenced subsequent societies, or a "sister culture," one whose "interactions through the region produced shared attributes of religion, art, political structure and hierarchical society."

Go Goth

In contemporary pop culture, a Goth is a young person who listens to Alien Sex Fiend and dresses exclusively in black. However, the Goths were a collection of Germanic tribes who probably originated in Scandinavia and migrated south and east in the early years of the Common Era. As they moved, they were influenced by the culture and technology of the Roman Empire, as well as by Turkish and Persian societies. In the fifth century, they overran Rome, replacing the declining imperial society with their own civilization, modifying Roman culture and institutions, and profoundly changing the future of Europe.

Barbarians at the Gate

When was "the sack of Rome"? The Eternal City has been attacked a number of times, with varying degrees of damage. The first raiders were the Gauls in 387 BCE, but according to legend the Romans were awakened by sacred geese honking in the night and were able to defend themselves from the attack. Later attempts were made by Alaric and the Goths in 410 CE, by the Vandals in 455, and by the Suebians in 472. Once the Gothic kings ruled Rome, they saw the city assaulted by the Ostrogoths in 535 and 553. The Saracens arrived in 846, followed by the Normans in 1084. Finally (thus far) in 1527, mutinous troops of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (mostly supporters of Martin Luther) surpassed the horrors of the early barbarians, looting churches and palaces, assaulting nuns, and torturing and killing citizens and prelates. Pope Clement VII had to escape from the Vatican through the Passetto (the secret passageway) into the fortress of Castel Sant'Angelo, and the event essentially ended the Italian Renaissance.

Lost Knowledge

There is no doubt that there was a magnificent library in ancient Alexandria, Egypt, perhaps the greatest and largest collection ever assembled up to that time. It is also certain that the library had vanished by the Middle Ages, but who destroyed it and how are unanswered questions (and possibly unanswerable, because earthquakes and floods have put that part of Alexandria under water today). There are several legends; you can pick your villain: two pagans, a Christian, or a Muslim may have destroyed the library.

In 48 BCE, Julius Caesar, aligned with Cleopatra against her brother, set fire to ships in the harbor. The flames spread to nearby buildings, destroying at least a book warehouse, if not the main library building. Three hundred years later, the Emperor Aurelian invaded Egypt, and much of the city was burned. The patriarch of Alexandria, Theophilus, is alleged to have sent a mob to raze the library and the surrounding pagan temples in the late fourth century. The story with the least historical evidence has Caliph Omar ordering the burning of the books because they either contradict the Koran and are heretical or agree with it and are therefore superfluous. Maybe it was just the centuries of humidity that claimed the scrolls of Alexandria.

Dating Epochs

In order to break from the regnal dating system used by the Roman emperors, early Church scholars chose the birth of Jesus as the starting point of their calendar, and the term anno Domini ("year of our Lord," or AD) gradually became popular. The abbreviation BC, for the years "before Christ" (the English translation of ante Christi), appeared much more recently.

For the last couple of centuries, some non-Christians have substituted the terms CE ("common era") and BCE ("before the common era"). Now many scholars and academics have adopted these terms as more inclusive. This change is far from universally accepted, although Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the United Nations, endorsed the idea in 1999: "The Christian calendar no longer belongs exclusively to Christians.... There is so much interaction between people of different faiths and cultures ... that some shared way of reckoning time is a necessity. And so the Christian Era has become the Common Era."

Lovers Asunder

As star-crossed as any Shakespearean lovers (and perhaps an inspiration to the Bard), Abelard and Héloïse were brilliant thinkers who gave themselves up utterly to love and paid the price for scandalizing twelfth-century France. He was the most popular philosopher and teacher in Europe; she, already incredibly well educated for a woman, became his student. Abelard described her in a letter to a friend:

Dear Héloïse ... Her wit and her beauty would have stirred the dullest and most insensible heart, and her education was equally admirable.... I saw her, I loved her, I resolved to make her love me. The thirst of glory cooled immediately in my heart, and all my passions were lost in this new one.

They fell in love, had a child, and were married (secretly, and over her objections) to protect the advance of his career. Her family sought revenge and arranged to have him castrated. Héloïse and Abelard fled Paris, each taking monastic vows, and rarely saw each other again. But they did correspond by letters, some of which have been preserved. Héloïse wrote in one of them:

I will still love you with all the tenderness of my soul till the last moment of my life.... If there is anything that may properly be called happiness here below, I am persuaded it is the union of two persons who love each other with perfect liberty, who are united by a secret inclination, and satisfied with each other's merits.... I have renounced life, and stript myself of everything, but I find I neither have nor can renounce my Abelard. Though I have lost my lover I still preserve my love ... do not forget me—remember my love and fidelity and constancy: love me as your mistress, cherish me as your child, your sister, your wife!

When Héloïse died, twenty years after Abelard, legend claims that they were buried together at the Paraclete, the abbey he had founded. But during the French Revolution their remains were moved or destroyed; today they have a tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, but it is unknown if either of them is actually buried there.

Cradle Books

Anything printed from about 1455 to the end of 1500—in the first decades of printing with movable metal type in the West—has a special name: incunabula ("incunables," in English), or "cradle books," because "they belong to the childhood of the art of printing." Still strongly influenced by medieval manuscripts, the first printers made books that resembled the work of scribes and were decorated by hand. The Bibles printed by Johannes Gutenberg and his associates are usually considered the first Western printed books. Gutenberg's workshop in Mainz, Germany, printed about 150 oversized copies of the Bible—the process required six men to set the type and took several months. Only twenty one complete copies still exist.

In the 1490s, Aldus Manutius established a press in Venice to print editions of ancient Greek classics, and he invented italic type (said to be based on the handwriting of the humanist scholar and poet Petrarch). Aldus wanted to publish beautiful books in small, affordable copies; he developed the octavo format (eight to ten inches tall), which made the works easy to transport—these were the forerunner of modern pocket editions. Aldus may also have invented the semicolon; one of his books contains the oldest known example in print. It's impossible to overestimate the revolutionary impact on literacy and the accessibility of information that began with the invention of the printing press in fifteenth-century Europe.

Out of Africa

The first African to come to the New World may have been Pedro Alonzo Niño (1468–1505?), who was not a slave but a pilot and a navigator for Christopher Columbus on his first voyage. It's possible that there were earlier trading contacts between Africa and the Americas, but historians are still debating the evidence. Africans were certainly involved in other European explorations: thirty black men were with Vasco Núñez de Balboa when he reached the Pacific Ocean in 1513; Africans accompanied Hernando Cortés to Mexico and Francisco Pizarro to Peru; and they ventured into Canada and the Mississippi Valley with the French. And, around 1780 or 1790, it was a black man from Haiti, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, who constructed the first non-Native dwelling at a trading post that would later be named Chicago.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from All Facts Considered: The Essential Library of Inessential Knowledgeby Kee Malesky Copyright © 2010 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0470559659
• ISBN 13: 9780470559659
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288