You hear it all the time, but what is it? Can you imagine one million? Can you see one million of anything?
With Hendrik Hertzberg’s “One Million,” you can. The book is 200 pages long, with 5,000 dots to a page. Yes, one million. That’s a lot of dots. And you can see them all. And as you’re perusing the book, you’ll see little note-like annotations with facts about history, politics, geography, and lots more.
On page 1, there’s a line pointing to the seventh dot in the book: “Poems by Emily Dickinson published during her lifetime (out of 1,700 she wrote).” The more dots, the more numbers to the facts and tidbits.
We’ve culled five of these.
5,488“Intrusions into government computer networks in 2008.”
138,435“Feet, length of a marathon.”
520,833“Cokes drunk worldwide every thirty seconds.”
731,636“Unmarried partners living together in California.”
992,000“Ounces of copper in the Statue of Liberty.”