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Wild factual inaccuracies
While I have loved other Mark Kurlansky books, this one comes closer to fields I have studied and I was horrified to discover that neither he nor his editors bother to fact check before publishing. I further discovered there is no way to contact the author directly to let him know of his errors.
He claims that "linguists regard Greek...to be...the grandparent of all modern European languages." (page 64 of 897 ebook version) My degree from UC Berkeley in linguistics disagrees with him. Modern European languages come from a number of different language families, most NOT descended from Greek.
He claims that silk contains cellulose. (page 91 of 897 ebook version). This is a gross misstatement. Cellulose is a polysaccharide: silk is a protein. These are distinctly different polymers. The idea that you can make something paper-like out of either does not make them the same thing.
At that point, I had to stop reading.
