The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology

#95
Title: The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology
Author: Simon Winchester
Publisher: Perennial
Year: 2001
Genre: History, Science, Biography
329 pages

While I liked The Map that Changed the World well enough, it was a slow read (about 25 pages a night). I preferred Winchester's OED-related books, perhaps because I'm actually interested in the picky details of dictionary development, and because with a focus on words his Byzantine sentences don't seem out of line. Winchester is somewhat repetitive, which helped to relate events to each other but also diminished any dramatic tension to be found in the story.

I didn't mind the intrusion of the author's story at mid-book; I understood it as an outcropping from a different era than the surrounding narrative, if I may use a geological metaphor. Perhaps the problem was that I gained little sense of William Smith's psychology, which made this more a book about the history of an idea and less about the progenitor of the idea. That's fine, but a less-rich narrative.

Winchester's richness seems typically to reside in his descriptions of the historical context in which the events of his books occurred. At this he is quite masterful. I enjoy Winchester's compulsive need to share amusing tangential or coincidental information in footnotes. He also turns one particularly fine phrase , which may help explain why there is so little of Smith's emotional stratum in this book. Regarding Smith: "He was no great diarist; but once in a while his entries make one wish he had been a better one" (p. 56).

One may read excerpts here.