The Phone Book, (Paperback)

from NielsenGW

Fresh off reading the Oxford English Dictionary for pleasure, Ammon Shea tackles the common phone book. Along the way, he finds a cast of characters both within and without. His readings of both historic and current telephone directories show how the world was and is, how it is changing and evolv...

from MartinBodek

What an excellent, fun, interesting read! So interesting, that I absorbed all the minutiae with relish and can probably spit it all back out, most preferably during a winning performance of Jeopardy!. Shea does spend about a quarter of the book detailing the history of the phone, which is necessa...

from Faradaydon

Shea's written an interesting, quirky tale about what on the face of it is a decidedly uninteresting book.

from bhenry11

Ammon Shea manages to make an incredibly interesting subject rife with possibility into a self-indulgent waste of time. Luckily, the book is short. I found this in the remainders section of a Borders before it went out of business. Now I know why it was there. Stay away, unless your thesis is on ...

from TLCrawford

Shea Ammon's "The phone book: the curious history of the book that everyone uses but no one reads" is an entertaining little book. However, it is not a history of the phone book. At best it is a collection of antecedents and musings that are at best tangentially connected to the telephone book. A...