In more than a dozen previous books, Simon Winchester has dedicated himself to expanding his readers’ knowledge on everything from dictionaries to oceans. In his latest, KNOWING WHAT WE KNOW, he examines the ways in which humans understand the world and communicate that understanding. In classic Winchester style, it combines a panoramic and microscopic view of this imposing subject, one that simultaneously enlightens and stimulates intellectual curiosity.

Among his lodestars are the well-known lines from T.S. Eliot’s 1934 work, "The Rock," an excerpt from which serves as one of the book’s epigraphs: “Where is the Life we have lost in living? / Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” From the modern field of information science, he introduces a concept known as the DIKW pyramid --- data, information, knowledge and wisdom --- and makes it clear, echoing Eliot’s plaintive questions, that there is a gulf between at least the lower two blocks in that pyramid and the highest.

"KNOWING WHAT WE KNOW isn’t guaranteed to set one on the path to wisdom, but it’s an enlightening companion to take on the journey."

In parsing some of those differences, Winchester blends a chronological and topical approach, pursuing a variety of pathways to explore how we learn, what we learn, and how we have transmitted that knowledge across time and space. Winchester received his degree in geology from Oxford and worked for a time as a field geologist for a mining company before pursuing a career of some three decades in journalism around the world. As might be expected of someone with that eclectic background, there seems to be few subjects that escape his interest, as he discourses on the birth of writing, educational examinations, libraries, encyclopedias, the inventions of paper and the printing press, and many more.

But in a survey that’s both compact and at times pleasantly digressive, Winchester takes the opportunity to examine some more thematic, but no less important, topics. Drawing on the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and his own firsthand reporting on Northern Ireland’s “Bloody Sunday” in 1972, for example, he considers the nature of truth in news and the power of propaganda --- what he calls “the distortions of history and the melancholy consequences of broadcasting mistruths.”

One of the delights of KNOWING WHAT WE KNOW is Winchester’s skill at character sketches of figures who almost certainly aren’t familiar to the general reader, but who nonetheless he considers vital contributors to the advancement of human knowledge. In that vein, he devotes several pages to the story of Fukuzawa Yukichi, a Japanese writer and public intellectual of the 19th century whom he credits with introducing Japan to Western culture and helping to bring the country into the modern world. Another is John Reith, the Scotsman who served as the first director-general of the BBC in 1927 and set what Winchester calls the “gold standard” for public broadcasting. And if you know nothing of Feng Guifen, Clarence King or Douglas Engelbart, you’ll get at least a taste of the reasons for their importance in the growth of human knowledge from this book.

In bringing his account current, Winchester recognizes that the ENIAC in the room is the explosion of digital information and the ease with which it’s available, making all of human knowledge accessible from a small device most of us carry in our pocket. With search engines like Google able to tap the world wide web’s estimated 1.5 billion websites in fractions of a second, Winchester asks what the effect on society will be when there is “eventually, no absolute need to know or retain --- retain being the operative word --- the knowledge of anything?” (his emphasis). And as we begin to digest with increasing rapidity some of the promise and perils of artificial intelligence, he suggests that it may not be a huge step to the day when “a computer may prove to be fully sentient, to have its own feelings and concerns that may not be wholly consonant with our own.”

Despite his justifiable fears about the ways we’re outsourcing our brains to these devices, Winchester ends his book on an optimistic note. “What if not having to tax our minds with such tedious matters as arithmetic and geography and spelling and memorizing so many facts actually frees parts of the mind?” he asks. Perhaps, he wonders, relieving ourselves of this menial activity will allow us to become “thoughtful, considerate, patient --- and wise.” KNOWING WHAT WE KNOW isn’t guaranteed to set one on the path to wisdom, but it’s an enlightening companion to take on the journey.