Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome (review)

the world. Likewise, “Electrification and the Cosmopolitan Web” deals with telecommunications, computers, and the Internet in the twentieth century. However, in his reflective conclusion William McNeill writes: “The central argument of this book is that throughout their history humans used symbols to create webs that communicated agreed-upon meanings and so, as time went by, sustained cooperation and conflict among larger and larger groups of people. . . . The human career on earth is unique, since no other species, not even termites, or ants, has ever deployed such a flexible and capacious web of communications to concert common effort on anything approaching human scale” (323–24). Surely, the library has historically been an institution to facilitate this process. In his final words he writes further that despite the catastrophes that are likely to befall the race, human beings “need face-to-face primary communities for long-range survival: communities, like those our predecessors belonged to, within which shared meanings, shared values, and shared goals made life worth living for everyone, even the humblest and least fortunate.” This coincides well with the community values thinking in the current library profession. But there is a final twist. He surprisingly concludes that, in the end, “religious sects and congregations are the principal candidates for this role. But communities of belief must somehow insulate themselves from unbelievers, and that introduces frictions or active hostilities into the cosmopolitan web” (326–27). I would not be the first to suggest that libraries and religious congregations, despite the tensions they introduce, share some common traits that engender civility in the commitment to and the search for reality and truth. The McNeills have achieved a magnificent synthesis of the many strands that make world history a human story linking every community into a whole with reciprocal links to the earth on which they exist. This brief but provocative survey will illuminate the world in which cultural records play a critical role. One cannot recommend it too highly.