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Obsessed with the origins of things, I have dug up enough beginnings and firsts for any barroom sage, or academician, to fend off the most troublesome trivia queries. Ranging from the beginnings of galaxies, the emergence of bacteria, and from bony fish to soap, loaded dice, ethnic slurs, hypnosis, comic strips and much more, The Browser's Book of Beginnings is a fascinating read - sampled randomly or digested whole. Illustrated with more than 100 drawings, diagrams, and archival photographs, and including comprehensive bibliographies and an index, The Browser's Book of Beginnings is a most readable and concise quick-reference book.
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Review from The New Yorker:
THE BROWSER'S BOOK OF BEGINNINGS: ORIGINS OF EVERYTHING UNDER (AND INCLUDING) THE SUN.
Mr. Panati tells us that the idea of a book on origins had its genesis: When he was surprised to learn that the croissant was invented by a baker in Vienna in 1863 to celebrate a victory over the Turks, the roll being symbolic of the Turkish crescent emblem. From that tiny acorn has grown a mighty oak of a book. Mr. Panati is fearless, far-reaching, formidable, and, when it pleases him, frivolous. His book opens with the thunder and lightning of the origin of the sun, the origin of the earth, the origin of life on our planet, and then relaxes into less uncertain beginnings - language and writing, fruits and grains, coffee and tea and cocaine, printing and comic strips, dogs and cats and
the sonata, typewriters and gunpowder, chess and tennis, parachutes and psychiatry, the ballet and the jury system, the metric system and cement - and ends with baseball, invented in England in the eighteenth century (there is a mention of it in "Northanger Abbey") and Americanized in the eighteen-forties by one Alexander Cartwright. All this is accomplished in twenty-nine chapters - each containing many capsule and generally sparkling essays - totalling almost four hundred good-sized pages.
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