Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Byson and Winchester, two great books , one must read....

If you read nothing else this year then take a break, take a week off, take on holiday, take a sickie, whatever it takes but do read these two great books: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson and Simon Winchester's The Map that Changed the World. Bryson's book because it attempts to answer nearly all the questions a layman could ever wish to know about the size of the Universe, the smallness of the atom, how come there are no more dodos etc, etc. and does so in an entertaining way. The book is over 500 pages long but it managed to keep me gripped for most of it; the man took three years to research and write it for God's sake so it has to be worth a few days of your time to read it. Winchester's book is another one of those seemingly boring topics, like Cod and The Potato, you'd think that very few people would be interested in but manages to captivate you and you realise that you don't have to be a geologist or an academic to be interested in rocks, fossils and strata if the book is suffieciently well written. It's about William "Strata" Smith, who dedicated much of his life to devising a map of the underground of England and Wales, in the late 1700s, at a time when it was accepted fact that the Earth had only been around since around 4,400 BC, because it said so in the Bible! So his thoughts and writings on fossils which must have been at least millions of years old were, to most, just gobbledigook. Like all great geniuses of British history Smith ended up in a debtors prison, having had his ideas plagerised, and his wife went mad and turned into a nyphamaniac, eventually ending up in a lunatic asylum. And all this for a map!! This story really should, if it hasn't already, be made into a period film. Read the books for yourselves and please share any recommendations of your own particularly good recent must reads....

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