The entire first half of the book, which is on ancient and medieval history, uses modern sources almost exclusively.
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In fact, of the about 260 citations in the book (and I'm counting all of the "ibid's" in this) a full 52 are "quoted in" or "cited by," and mainly the former. It means he took his information from someone else and did not verify the original source. It's not an important point nor a particularly important passage, but it is sloppy scholarship. In fact, if he had looked at the original, rather than the student paper, he would have understood that Fagan was quoting someone else in his description of Panizzi, not making the statement himself, as Wright states. Now, I admit that the book may not have been available via Google Book Search when Wright was composing his work, but by no means is the original inaccessible. Fagan's book is available in at least 80 US libraries, according to WorldCat, although today I was able to get to it online. Plus, I was taught that you only took quotes from someone else if the original is terribly hard to get to. You can find it linked from this page of student writings.) A perfectly fine school paper, but probably not an authoritative source. Negrucci was a student in the UCLA library school at the time of writing this paper, done for IS 281 "Historical Methodology for Library and Information Science." (The citation above is no longer valid. Louis Fagan, quoted in Teresa Negrucci, 'Historiography of Antonio Panizzi,' 2001, "I looked up the paper online, and Ms. I looked at the citation for the quote and found: On page 167, Wright quotes a biographer, one Louis Fagan, on Panizzi's appearance. I've gotten as far as Panizzi, but had to get all of this out of my system before going on.
I have kept reading, I guess because I wanted to get to his treatment of more modern times. I have no idea if that is where Wright got his information, but this statement makes the same mistake that Wright does.
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I moved this mis-stated misunderstanding here: "A legal text or code of conduct is sometimes called a codex (for example, the Justinian Codex), since laws were recorded in large codices." This is simply an error, one that doesn't come into educated or official discourse. There had been some confusion between codex and code in an early Wikipedia version of the codex page, and it was removed: I began to wonder where he would have gotten such a definition, and on a hunch decided to look at the Wikipedia entry on Codex. The use of "code" for groups of laws came from the term "codex," not vice versa. a new form of document: the codex book, so named because it originated from attempts to 'codify' the Roman law in a format that supported easier information retrieval."Codex comes from "codify"? Were the Romans speaking English? And besides, I'd recently read a few books on book history myself and those all referred to that origin as being from the Latin term "caudex" referring to wood used as the first book covers. OK, we all can slip up when we get going at the keyboard, and I figured that his editors just hadn't paid attention. Famine, pestilence, war - those are leading causes of human mortality. "It is no coincidence that snakes have been a leading cause of human mortality throughout our species' history, so it should come as no surprise that the occurrence of serpent imagery tracks closely to the prevalence of poisonous snakes in particular regions."I don't doubt that snakes are scary creatures and they sure do seem to show up in all kinds of ancient imagery and tales, but "a leading cause of human mortality"? I don't think so. I became suspicious when I read on page 21 Now I'm going out of my mind reading Alex Wright's Glut, which I can only describe as poorly researched, and in some cases just outright wrong.
I thoroughly enjoyed Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which drove real scientists nuts for everything it got wrong. Similarly, when reporters write about something you know intimately, the reports are almost always aggravatingly wrong. In many cases, the report of the event is so wrong, so different to what you experienced, that you could hardly recognize it as being the same event.
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You've probably had the experience of participating in some activity that was later covered by print or TV news.
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