THE GREAT WAVE: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
(HarperCollins, $37.99)
“It is a quick read on important topics. The drawback is that it is not as interesting as it thinks it is.
The arrival of the Gutenberg printing press in the late Middle Ages may have been good for literacy but it was bad for witches. It hastened the Age of Reason but it was also the ideal vehicle for what we today call misinformation, chiefly in printing bestselling treatises on demonology –which led to the 15th-century craze for witch-hunting.
“The same forces that eventually spurred the Renaissance initially sped up
