This should have been an interesting book. The unravelling stories of individual libraries such as the one at Alexandria, one in a german death camp, and the New York Public, and their relationships to one another were right up my alley. The problem was, although it’s obvious the author has a passion for libraries, he doesn’t write as though he does. This work reads like a text book. The language is flat, the sentences strewn with unecessary jargon. He falls into the trap of trying to sound super smart and it backfires on him. He manages to turn even the most charming of anecdotal stories into cluttered blocks of text the reader wants nothing more than to reach the end of.

This book gets an “A” for content, but a “D” for execution.