Go slowly when devouring this charming, intelligent, highly informative history.
A cavalcade of clocks.
Rooney, the former curator of timekeeping at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, takes readers on a dramatic historical tour of horology to show what clocks mean; how, over thousands of years, they became more precise; and how time itself “has been harnessed, politicized and weaponized.” The author delivers a lovely, personal, idiosyncratic “story centered on power, control, money, morality and belief.” Rooney traces the development in timekeeping instruments, from the earliest sundials to an acoustic water clock that may have existed in the city of Verona in the early 500s to a plutonium time-capsule clock buried in Osaka in 1970. Automaton water clocks spread across the medieval Islamic world to remind its citizens of who was in power, and the first mechanical and astronomical clocks flourished throughout Europe after the 13th century. Gradually, Rooney notes, a new idea was born: “that time could be wasted.” The author chronicles his visit to Siena to observe a painting from 1338 that prominently features the “oldest known depiction of an hourglass.” This timepiece, he writes, represented “the cutting edge of horological technology” that would impact the way Western civilization thought about right and wrong, life and death. In the 1610s, Amsterdam’s groundbreaking stock exchange erected “one of the most significant clocks ever made…sounding the birth of modern capitalism.” In 1732, the Indian city of Jaipur constructed the largest sundial ever. The rise of coastal time signals—balls, discs, guns, or flags—“spoke volumes about the shifting sands of global geopolitics.” Rooney also insightfully explores the ramifications of electricity and the creation of standardized time, which had a controversial, even violent, cultural impact: “we have poured our very identities into clocks.” Somberly, the author writes about the “The Clock of Doom,” designed in 1947, which reminds “us what happens when time runs out.” Throughout, Rooney entertains with witty clock trivia and anecdotes alongside illuminating sketches of famous horologists.
Go slowly when devouring this charming, intelligent, highly informative history.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-393-86793-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A remarkably thorough and thoughtful case for the reconciliation between science and faith.
A duo of French mathematicians makes the scientific case for God in this nonfiction book.
Since its 2021 French-language publication in Paris, this work by Bolloré and Bonnassies has sold more than 400,000 copies. Now translated into English for the first time by West and Jones, the book offers a new introduction featuring endorsements from a range of scientists and religious leaders, including Nobel Prize-winning astronomers and Roman Catholic cardinals. This appeal to authority, both religious and scientific, distinguishes this volume from a genre of Christian apologetics that tends to reject, rather than embrace, scientific consensus. Central to the book’s argument is that contemporary scientific advancements have undone past emphases on materialist interpretations of the universe (and their parallel doubts of spirituality). According to the authors’ reasoned arguments, what now forms people’s present understanding of the universe—including quantum mechanics, relativity, and the Big Bang—puts “the question of the existence of a creator God back on the table,” given the underlying implications. Einstein’s theory of relativity, for instance, presupposes that if a cause exists behind the origin of the universe, then it must be atemporal, non-spatial, and immaterial. While the book’s contentions related to Christianity specifically, such as its belief in the “indisputable truths contained in the Bible,” may not be as convincing as its broader argument on how the idea of a creator God fits into contemporary scientific understanding, the volume nevertheless offers a refreshingly nuanced approach to the topic. From the work’s outset, the authors (academically trained in math and engineering) reject fundamentalist interpretations of creationism (such as claims that Earth is only 6,000 years old) as “fanciful beliefs” while challenging the philosophical underpinnings of a purely materialist understanding of the universe that may not fit into recent scientific paradigm shifts. Featuring over 500 pages and more than 600 research notes, this book strikes a balance between its academic foundations and an accessible writing style, complemented by dozens of photographs from various sources, diagrams, and charts.
A remarkably thorough and thoughtful case for the reconciliation between science and faith.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9789998782402
Page Count: 562
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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