Book reviews: ‘On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World’ and ‘They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live With Its Legacy’

‘On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World’ by Florence Hazrat

Not so long ago, said Judith Shulevitz in The Atlantic, “WRITINGLOOKEDLIKETHIS.” We’re all thus fortunate that punctuation gradually emerged, beginning with the Babylonians’ breakthrough idea of grouping words inside boxes. A bigger leap occurred in the 2nd century B.C. when Aristophanes of Byzantium, head of Alexandria’s unmatched library, came up with a system odots to indicate pauses amid written language’s rivers of words. In the years since, “the rules of punctuation have been codified, but they have never stopped evolving,” and Florence Hazrat’s entertaining new book ushers us through that history. The book is “no mere wacky usage guide,” said Steven Poole in The Guardian. It’s instead “a lavishly researched scholarly inquiry into punctuation over the centuries,” all of it undergirded by Hazrat’s “admirable insistence that punctuation is part of writing itself, an essential component of style and of the architecture of thought.”

“Dashes, colons, parentheses—they are all covered here, as are emojis,” said Jim Kelly in Air Mail. The ancestor of the question mark debuted in the 5th century while the spaces that we place between words didn’t exist until Irish monks introduced them three centuries later. Hazrat makes the particulars of each of these developments “utterly delightful.” Speaking of which, “let’s give a shoutout to Italian poet Iacopo Alpoleio,” the godfather of the exclamation point. Hazrat is “a keen user” of that particular mark, said Constance Higgins in The Telegraph (U.K.), and her spirited style can grow annoying. But she’s also willing to accept that her story can’t remain one of constant innovation. Most of the punctuation marks we know today were “cooked up in the rhetorical hotbeds of Renaissance Italy.” If we’re honest, “progress more or less stopped there.”

“There’s a lot of good in On the Mark,” said Meghan Cox Gurdon in The Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately, Hazrat’s achievement is undercut by her determination to enlist punctuation’s history in scoring political points. While she’s on firm ground when she notes that the editors who added exclamation points to Shakespeare’s plays forever changed how readers view the female characters, we quickly “go whizzing off into the land of political grievance.” Ignoring countless less hateful political figures who littered their pronouncements with exclamation points, she calls out Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels for the offense, then links Goebbels’ speechwriting to Donald Trump’s social media posts. She even finds proIsrael bias in the hyphen at the heart of the phrase “Israel-Palestine conflict.” Ignore the partisan preaching in this book, though, and you’re likely to agree with its central message. In short, “punctuation marks do matter.”

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‘They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live With Its Legacy’ by Lauren Collins

“The Wilmington Massacre constituted a watershed moment in American history,” said Sally Greene in American Scholar. Lauren Collins’ “brilliant” new book isn’t the first to shed light on the events of Nov. 10, 1898, when a mob of armed white men launched a deadly attack on the Black political and business leaders of Wilmington, N.C., ending the city’s rule by a multiracial coalition and its successful post–Civil War run as a Black-majority municipality. At least 22 and perhaps hundreds of Black residents were killed in the violence. But Collins, a white New Yorker writer who was born and raised in Wilmington, “expands the timeline and widens the lens,” building on David Zucchino’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize–winning Wilmington’s Lie to show how the massacre’s aftermath continues to shape her hometown more than 125 years after it inspired the systematic disenfranchisement of Black voters across the South.

Collins’ book is “distinguished by its deep interest in the origins of the horror,” said The Economist. She opens by introducing an enslaved teenager working on a 1770s plantation and, while developing the stories of four families still tied to Wilmington, builds toward the 1898 clash. The elite planners of the coup wanted power back, and they ensured that the militia they assembled was “armed to the teeth in advance.” As Collins follows the ripple effects of the resulting massacre, “she rightly measures the crime not just in violence but in loss of livelihoods, opportunities, connections, and futures.”

Collins’ book “uncovers history that even many longtime Wilmingtonians don’t know,” said John Staton in Wilmington’s Star News. One of the white families she chronicles is celebrated locally for having brought European workers to the area in the early 1900s, but Collins notes that the landowner who did so was an 1898 insurrectionist who refused to hire Black workers. She also connects 1898 to the city’s troubling school desegregation battles of the 1960s. It’s “sobering” to realize that Collins was right when she decided that the story of the massacre couldn’t be contained to its own time period, said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. “It had numerous antecedents, and its effects continued to reverberate across generations.”