As the title suggests, this is in fact a brief history of diaries; a very easy read if you have a couple of hours to kill, and would like to learn more about, well, diarists. There's not much more to say: Johnson gives us a couple of pages on the obvious (Pepys, Boswell), the well known (Darwin, Lewis & Clark, Thoreau), and selected authors (Burney, Mansfield, Woolf, Tolstoys). There were two surprises: first, the 'war diaries' section was given over primarily to women (Frank, Chestnut, Hillesum, Iris Origo), which worked very well. Second, the final chapter on 'cyberspace and digital diarists' is intellectually offensive: 12 or so pages about how LIKE THE INTERNET REVOLUTIONISES EVERYTHING AND NOW EVERYTHING IS GREAT BECAUSE WE'RE SHARING AND NOT ASHAMED YOU KNOW? Lest you think I'm exaggerating:

"Twenty-first-century diary keeping is now that perfect mix of confession, self-expression and moral improvement by sharing rather than concealing... Foursquare, a mobile social network, now allows users to tell others where they are located at that precise moment."

Goodbye, Virginia Woolf, today we have Foursquare--making the world a better... wait, does Foursquare even exist anymore? Apparently so. But it's not clear to me what any of this has to do with diaries.

More importantly, the Brief History is determinedly nominalist; no attempts to bring things together (except to point out how GREAT EVERYTHING IS TODAY), little attempt to link the use of diaries to anything outside of diaries. But that's just a reason to read more diaries, and books about diaries. Johnson's book certainly made me want to do that, which is no mean thing. ( )

Dithered a bit about rating this book, I have read much better histories and commentaries about diaries, Thomas Mallon for example, but it is labeled as a brief history, so fair enough.

there are a number of books included that I would not call diaries, they were written well after the events, that's autobiography. And lot of works intended for public use, are Lewis and Clark's writing about their discoveries for the US government diaries?

to me a diary is personal reflective writing not a ships log. ( )