Questioning Judaism(Cultural Memory in the Present Series): Interviews by Elisabeth Weber Book

What I would really like is an English translation of some of Kircher's books. Lacking that, though, I have found a few books with scholarly commentary on various works that place his writings in context. This one I got through interlibrary loan.
I enjoyed seeing an engraving of the Roman College museum that Kircher ran. His books were spread around the world, but he also worked with Jesuits around the world to bring knowledge together. One of his projects involved collecting information about magnetic deviation from true north around the world as a means of determining longitude. I had not really understood what his universal translation device consisted of-- it was essentially a look-up table for a limited vocabulary, as well as some grammatical notation (what part a role played in the sentence). I also admired his arrangement of magnets that could be used to send messages: a kind of early radio transmission.
The discussion of his categorization of fossils was enlightening. I had thought, from just perusing the pictures in Mundus Subterraneus that he was deeply confused about where fossils came from. But it turns out he more or less had the right idea. The examples he gives of things that aren't fossils but pareidolia he points out as such.