The title and cover page are pretty bad. And I agree that the book has an audience in spite of the primary reviewer's reservations. After all we do need to bring the level of awareness up as many ways as possible, and most seem to agree that the book has nice stories and was pleasantly aware of Walter Ong's work. There are also other things that Gleick is clueless about. On the history side, Gleick did not have a clear picture of Gibbs' nor Jaynes' contributions to Bayesian inference as applicable beyond thermal physics. As far as the present is concerned, these omissions underpin an ignorance of the non-local nature of information as a multi-moment correlation measure (KL-divergence). This ignorance is shared by many from all walks of life, in spite of its relevance e.g. to complex systems and to quantum computing. Sharon McGrayne's "The theory that would not die" provides some other pieces to the still incomplete puzzle for the lay reader. Look for more pieces in the days ahead.