Interesting but flawed biography
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Simon Winchester tells the largely forgotten story of self-taught geologist William Smith, the father of modern geology. Though the "barely educated lower middle class scholar takes on academic and social establishments and (eventually) wins" formula is not exactly original, the book is pacy enough and the human and scientific interests well balanced enough to keep it an enthralling read.
William Smith was the son of an Oxfordshire blacksmith. His childhood fascination with rocks and fossils led to his employment as a surveyor of mines and builder of canals, and to his discovery that the rocks of his native county lay in strata, always in the same order and always bearing the same unique fossils in each layer. He theorised that this pattern would be replicated throughout Britain, and that the fossils themselves showed that the layers of rocks were layed down at different times. Though to the twenty-first century, this does not sound very revolutionary, to the late eighteenth, before Darwin and when Bishop Ussher's dating of the divine creation of the Earth to 4004 B.C. was still popularly accepted, it was unheard of.
Smith's reputation spread, and soon his professional services were in demand throughout the country, allowing him also to test his geological theories; he astonished his patrons by being able to predict almost on sight whether their lands held coal strata. His plan was to produce a map of the geology of the entire British Isles.
Unfortunately, financial imprudence and lack of social standing, as well as possibly the stigma of an apparently insane wife and the professional jealously of his rivals, damaged Smith's career to such an extent that he was imprisoned for debt. These circumstances are not so well covered by Winchester; I suspect that Smith's diary is by so much the primary source here that he is only able to retell the story Smith himself recorded. The details of the "nymphomaniac" wife, for example, are particularly scanty.
This is unfortunate. For the most part, the book is very lively, easy to read, and Smith's story seems to hold a personal fascination for Winchester. In part, this is explained by a central chapter containing a childhood memoir from the author, on his finding of an ammonite on a Dorset beach; this did, I have to say, sit rather uncomfortably in the middle of Smith's biography; it might just have worked better as a prologue. And the assertion that amateur palaeontology is "no more than the mark of the nerd" is hardly appropriate in such a book! We forgive Winchester his failings though; we are too busy routing for Smith.
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Repetitive repetitive repetitive
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I had to give up reading this book, which I found very interesting because I couldn't cope with the author labouring the point. Take this example from page 172 of my copy:
For anyone today to walk eastwards, from Dorset to Dover along this coastline, just as William Smith had walked eastwards along the Somerset Coal Canal from Dunkerton to Limpley Stoke some two centuries before, is to walk forwards in geological time - is to walk away from and out of the older rocks and towards and into the newer. The cliffs that ranged before me now were each made of rocks that were successively younger than those in the cliffs that ranged behind me. The more distantly ahead of me they ranged, the younger and younger they became - so that those lost in the shimmering haze of the afternoon belonged to whole stages and epochs of geological time that were far more recent than those beside and behind me.
Apart from the fact that the reader is by now quite familiar with the starting and finishing point of the Somerset Coal Canal and with the fact that Smith lived 200 years ago (this fact is repeated many times as either "200 years ago" or "two centuries before")the author has now told us that the rocks get younger as one walks from Dorset to Dover 4 times in one paragraph.
I just couldn't take it anymore!
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Almost interesting
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I really tried to enjoy this book, yet despite one failed and one successful attempt at finishing it, I was left ultimately disappointed.
The subject is potentially enthralling, but the writing style and pretension of the author result in a book that is repetitive and difficult to read.
I have two main objections to this book, first, the excessive use of footnotes on almost every page. Reading these notes results in a book that fails to flow, and is consequently difficult to read. Not reading these notes would involve ignoring almost a third of the provided text.
Second, the author’s over heightened self importance, leading to an entire chapter (in which the author discusses his finding of a fossil during childhood) that adds nothing to the book, and would be better removed entirely.
Essentially the author appears undecided as to whether this book is his personal autobiography, or the biography of William Smith.
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Intriguing book about one of the fathers of geology
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I admit it... I'd never heard of William Smith. In fact the reason I picked up this book was it seemed an interesting title and I'd read a couple of other Simon Winchester books and found them to be a really interesting read. William Smith was a self-taught geologist who recognised that in different parts of Britain the underground rock structure was different. He therefore took it upon himself to create an underground map of Britain showing how the various rock formations co-exist. The narration of Smith's life is fascinating, encompassing a determination to succeed despite being a blacksmith's son (seen at that time as being an unsuitable background for someone wishing to mix with aristocracy). It tells of how this desire resulted in bankruptcy, prison, but only years later getting some of the recognition he deserved. I would definitely recommend this book if you have read other Simon Winchester books before, or if you are interested in learning a bit about geology and how this science started out.
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What a shame
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An incredibly interesting story spoilt by quite a dreadful book. Having absolutely loved Dava Sobel's "Longitude", I relished the opportunity to read another tale where sheer brilliance of thinking coupled with absolute belief, triumphs over the arrogance and prejudice of the self-styled "elite" of scientific minds of the time. Unfortunately, to get at the facts, one has to suffer too much of Winchester's over romanticised hypothysizing which serves as padding at best. Most irritating of all is the author's own displays of vanity in which he introduce details of his own life (references of "going up to Oxford" etc.,) into the text as if they're somehow relevant.What a shame. The clue for me is in the title of the book itself. "The Map that changed the World".Pomposity itself! Sadly a genuinely great man has had his story placed in the hands of vain one
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