Book Review: On The Mark by Florence Hazrat
Misses The Mark. This is a book that should have been completely objective. It should have been completely neutral on all things politics. It would have been an easy five stars and utterly useful for everyone had it been.
Instead, Hazrat chooses to infuse her personal politics into the story in several areas from the historical (including discussions of Shakespeare, the Bronte Sisters, Whitman, and the "correct" (according to her view) interpretation of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which gets a rather large amount of vitriol dedicated specifically to what she views as recent Supreme Court errors here) to the modern (praising a pregnant "man" emoji while proclaiming that precision matters... except when it comes to biological sex, apparently, while also going on an anti-AI diatribe a bit later). Now, these are certainly areas where if you agree with Hazrat's politics, you're going to appreciate these sections a lot more than someone who doesn't. But here's the problem: By including them *at all*, Hazrat calls into question every bit of the rest of her discussion here and even her professionalism and scholarship generally. Whether you agree or not is irrelevant. Causing such damage to what should be an instructive and informative book for everyone, no matter their views, is the massive flaw of this book - where it "misses the mark" and the source of the star deduction.
On the bibliography, Hazrat actually clocks in at a respectable 17% here. Not the best I've seen, but far from the worst and at least meets my 15% bare minimum expectations, so the text retains the star that would come off a lesser book there.
Outside of the politics though, Hazrat actually does a rather phenomenal job of walking through the entirety of the history of the written word, showing the development and adoption of punctuation in all its forms - both exploratory and (eventually) accepted - from the earliest written languages (Sumerian cunieform) all the way through the development of emojis and other online text based communications. It is simply a shame that the political discussions mar what could have been so very rich, as though Hazrat set out to make a lobster risotto that would have made Gordon Ramsay weep with envy... and then burned the rice, seemingly intentionally for some weird reason.
Still, for the information presented outside of the political diatribes, this really is a book that everyone should read. For those who will be tempted towards defenestration over the politics... don't. There's enough here that will be utterly fascinating to know outside of this, and the overall points she makes here about how something so seemingly benign and banal as punctuation - and who gets to insert it into a given text - can be so very transformative to human thought, both individually and collectively and both in the present and for centuries to come, deserve serious consideration and contemplation.
I simply *really* wish she hadn't inserted so much of her own extremist politics and so heavily marred that crucial message.
Recommended.
This review of On The Mark by Florence Hazrat was originally written on August 10, 2026.
