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

Malesky, Kee

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0470559659 ISBN 13: 9780470559659

Verlag: John Wiley & Sons, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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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!

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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....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: John Wiley & Sons
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0470559659
• ISBN 13: 9780470559659
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland