The Light Ages by Seb Falk

The Light Ages by Seb Falk ISBN-13: 9781324002932 Hardcover: 416 pages Publisher: W. W. Norton Company Released: November 17th 2020

Source: review copy from the publisher.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
Soaring Gothic cathedrals, violent crusades, the Black Death: these are the dramatic forces that shaped the medieval era. But the so-called Dark Ages also gave us the first universities, eyeglasses, and mechanical clocks, proving that the Middle Ages were home to a vibrant scientific culture.

In The Light Ages, Cambridge science historian Seb Falk takes us on an immersive tour of medieval science through the story of one fourteenth-century monk, John of Westwyk. From multiplying Roman numerals to navigating by the stars, curing disease, and telling time with an ancient astrolabe, we learn emerging science alongside Westwyk, while following the gripping story of the struggles and successes of an ordinary man in a precarious world. An enlightening history that argues that these times weren’t so dark after all, The Light Ages shows how medieval ideas continue to color how we see the world today.


My Review:
The Light Ages explained in detail some of the mathematics, astronomy, and scientific knowledge of the 1300s. Not much is known about a monk named John of Westwyk. What little is known about his life is used as a frame for talking about the mathematics and science that he would've encountered and used. The author didn't just tell what he knew but explained in detail how they did the mathematics or used the machines.

He explained how they could tell time by shadows and the sun's location, how to count using Roman numerals and the sexagesimal system, why they changed over to using Hindu-Arabic numerals, and the development of precise clocks and accurate calendars from the close observation of the sun, moon, and stars. He explained how monks were sent to universities and the opposition to their learning and debating Aristotle's ideas before learning theology. He explained how to use an astrolabe, the Albion device developed at St. Albans, and how astrology was calculated and used to predict weather. He talked about St. Albans and the priory at Tynemouth and how some monks went on crusade. He explained why many medieval maps are distorted but served a distinct, useful purpose, the development of compasses and the exploration of magnetic attraction, and general information about medicine at the time and what was used for dysentery. He ended by explaining John's creation--a computer of the planets--and how it could be used to quickly find where the planets were in the sky. Overall, this book may be of most interest to mathematicians as a lot of math was described, but it does convey how scientific knowledge was being exchanged between cultures and religions and actively developed during the Middle Ages.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.


Excerpt: Read an excerpt using Google Preview.

Survival Tips by Clive Johnson

Survival Tips by Clive Johnson ISBN-13: 9781782749790 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Amber Books Released: April 14, 2020

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
With a total of 150 expert survival tips, Survival Tips gives you the basic skills to keep going in any situation. Tips range from using an ice axe and sheltering from the wind, to finding fresh water and building a protective shelter. Survival Tips explains how to stay safe in every environment, from the sub-zero landscape of the Arctic to the scorching suns of the tropics. Topics covered include: edible plants and animals, finding water, celestial navigation, surviving at sea, constructing shelters, hunting and trapping techniques, making fire, and more. Illustrated with more than 100 black-and-white illustrations.


My Review:
Survival Tips provides a series of brief tips about how to stay safe in a variety of landscapes (desert, snow, jungle, etc.) and how to deal with different emergency situations. This book is not comprehensive, not really survival training, and wasn't necessarily about unexpected emergency situations. For example, it started off with advice about what to carry in your survival kit when going hiking. The water survival tips assumed that you had been on a yacht equipped with a survival raft, so you can grab canned goods, a can opener, and water before getting into the raft. The author did have an illustration showing how to lash a raft together from wood, but a YouTube video showing these techniques in action would be more helpful and comprehensive.

The tips were generally only a few sentences long. He'd tell you how to find water, what animals and plants are edible, and what animals and plants are dangerous. However, you already have to know how to identify these plants and animals for this information to be useful. He also gave commonsense advice and advice that you probably would be given by instructors if you were going hiking in a snowy, mountainous area or visiting a desert area. He also gave some information about first aid, but much of this ended with evacuating the person to a hospital as fast as possible. Even if you had this book on hand in a survival situation, I didn't feel like the information was complete enough to help you survive. Since I learned how to do first aid, use maps, make fires, etc., in Girl Scouts and from my parents, I didn't really find much of this information useful.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.

The Nature Instinct by Tristan Gooley

The Nature Instinct by Tristan Gooley ISBN-13: 9781615194797 Hardcover: 400 pages Publisher: The Experiment Released: Nov. 20, 2018

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
Master outdoorsman Tristan Gooley has long encouraged his readers to look closely at the world to discover its hidden clues. Through careful cultivation of our senses, we can use the Big Dipper to tell time, for example, and a budding flower to find south. In The Nature Instinct, we learn how to train ourselves through slow observation so that, ultimately, we can intuit the inner workings of the world around us without having to stop to think about it. Discover how Gooley and other expert observers—from hunters in the English countryside to the Pygmy people in the African Congo—have recovered this lost sixth sense that unlocks a subconscious, deeper understanding of our surroundings.


My Review:
The Nature Instinct is about how the author learned to be more aware of nature, especially about how animals act. He started each short chapter by describing a time when he observed a certain thing or used a skill. In the case of learning to navigate by using the sun or stars or becoming more aware of the wind direction, he described how the reader can learn to do this (even if you don't live in England). In the chapters about animal behavior, he talked about how certain animals--mostly wild animals--act and why.

I had thought the book would be more about practical skills rather than things like how to anticipate which tree a squirrel will run up when it feels threatened. It seemed like most of the book was either about anticipating animal behavior or why we should take the time to closely observe nature. I already enjoy observing nature, and it felt like the book was more trying to intrigue and educate people who normally don't spend much time doing so.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.

Compass by Alan Gurney

Compass by Alan Gurney Hardback: 288 pages Publisher: W. W. Norton First Released: 2004

Source: From a library book sale.

Book Description from Publisher's Website:
Compass chronicles the misadventures of those who attempted to perfect the magnetic compass—so precious to sixteenth-century seamen that, by law, any man found tampering with it had his hand pinned to the mast with a dagger. From the time man first took to the seas until only one thousand years ago, sight and winds were the sailor's only navigational aids. It was not until the development of the compass that maps and charts could be used with any accuracy—even so, it would be hundreds of years and thousands of shipwrecks before the marvelous instrument was perfected. And its history up to modern times is filled with the stories of disasters that befell sailors who misused it. In this page-turning history of man's search for reliable navigation of treacherous sea routes around the globe, Alan Gurney brings to life the instrument Victor Hugo called "the soul of the ship."


Review:
Compass tells the impressive story of the development of the marine magnetic compass, starting at about 1187 AD and going into modern times. The movement of the ship and the iron used in building the ship, in ship-board weapons, and in items stored on board caused no end of havoc to the magnetic compass' ability to correctly point toward magnetic north. As ship building techniques changed, new ways of correcting for these problems had to be devised. This book described these developments as well as scientific sea-voyages done to discover what the source of these problems was and some information about other methods of marine navigation. Some of this information overlapped a bit with the story told in Longitude by Dava Sobel.

There were some black and white illustrations--mainly of the various compass types and maps related to the solving of the compass deviation problem. Since details about the scientific (compass-focused) voyages were included, it would have been nice to have a map showing the route of these voyages. However, I could generally follow the route described without a map.

The author assumed the reader had a certain familiarity with ships and the sea, so he would define those terms only once and not very clearly. The book also focused on the developments in the compass from the perspective of Britain, only briefly mentioning what the rest of the world was doing with compasses.

The book was written in a conversational style and, overall, I found the book enjoyable and well-written. It seemed aimed toward people who use a marine compass--to increase their appreciation for it--but the book will probably also appeal to those who read and enjoyed Longitude and to those who like reading about how different technologies have developed.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.


Excerpt from Chapter One
The cry of "Breakers ahead!" was the first warning that the navigating officers had made a dreadful mistake in their dead reckoning, or, in the mordant Spanish equivalent, their navegacion de fantasia.

Minutes later, in the howling dark of an autumn night, four ships of a Royal Navy fleet were mastless hulks being pounded to pieces between the hammer blows of the Atlantic breakers and the anvil of the Scilly Islands' granite reefs. Some two thousand men and officers from HMS Association, Eagle, Firebrand, and Romney died on that night of October 23, 1707. One more vessel, HMS St. George, struck hard but surged clear and survived.

Among the drowned was the fleet's portly, florid-faced commander, the fifty-seven-year-old Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell. His body was found washed ashore in a sandy bay some seven miles from the wreck. Legend has it that a local woman, thirty years later, made a death-bed confession that she had found a waterlogged Sir Cloudsley unconscious on the shore, and then helped him into eternity for the sake of the diamond and emerald rings on his fingers.

The death by drowning of two thousand men and the loss of ships is still considered the worse shipwreck disaster ever suffered by the Royal Navy. It led the British government, by a 1714 Act of Parliament, to create the Board of Longitude and its financial prizes for anyone discovering a "practicable and useful" method of determining a ship's longitude at sea. The end result was threefold: the publishing of accurate astronomical tables for calculating the lunar distance method of finding longitude; John Hadley's reflecting quadrant for the accurate measurement of lunar distances; and John Harrison's famous marine chronometer.

Ironically enough, the shipwreck disaster was not so much a matter of longitude but more a matter of latitude, inaccurate charts, an unknown current, and shoddy compasses.

Longitude by Dava Sobel

Longitude by Dava Sobel Hardback: 208 pages Publisher: Walker & Company First Released: 1995

Source: Bought from library book sale

Back Cover Description:
Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day--and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives, and the increasing fortunes of nations, hung on a resolution.

The quest for a solution had occupied scientists and their patrons for the better part of two centuries when, in 1714, England's Parliament upped the ante by offering a king's ransom (£20,000, or approximately $12 million in today's currency) to anyone whose method or device proved successful. Countless quacks weighed in with preposterous suggestions. The scientific establishment of Europe--from Galileo to Sir Issac Newton--had mapped the heavens in both hemispheres in its certain pursuit of a celestial answer. In stark contrast, one man, John Harrison, dared to imagine a mechanical solution--a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had ever been able to do on land.

Longitude is a dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and Harrison's forty-year obsession with building his perfect timekeeper, known today as the chronometer. Full of heroism and chicanery, brilliance and the absurd, it is also a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation, and clockmaking. Through Dava Sobel's consummate skill, Longitude will open a new window on our world for all who read it.


Review:
Longitude is an enjoyable, easy-to-read and understand overview of the events surrounding "the longitude problem," including the various solutions proposed, the political and scientific rivalry involved in the quest for the prize, and the scientific advances that occurred in pursuit of the solution.

The book doesn't really go into depth on how the clock was created. Apparently no one really knows how John Harrison solved each challenge in keeping perfect time while at sea. But we're told the solution found in his finished products even if we don't learn the process of how he got there.

I found very interesting the overview of sea navigation at that time and the scientific advances that came about while in pursuit of the longitude prize money. I also enjoyed learning why Greenwich became the 0 degree longitude line and time-setter for the world.

While I thought the author did a wonderful job describing what the various clocks looked like, I'm glad that pictures of John Harrison and several of his clocks were shown on the front cover of the book. The book doesn't contain pictures or diagrams beyond this. (I didn't mind, though, since the clock innards were apparently confusingly complex so pictures of that wouldn't have been enlightening.)

Overall, I enjoyed this book. I'd recommend this quick read to anyone interested in an overview of the longitude problem, the solutions proposed, and how Harrison's clock eventually came to 'rule the seas.'


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.


Excerpt from Chapter One
As a child, I learned the trick for remembering the difference between latitude and longitude. The latitude lines, the parallels, really do stay parallel to each other as they girdle the globe from the Equator to the poles in a series of shrinking concentric rings. The meridians of longitude go the other way: They loop from the North Pole to the South and back again in great circles of the same size, so they all converge at the ends of the Earth.

Lines of latitude and longitude began crisscrossing our worldview in ancient times, at least three centuries before the birth of Christ. By A.D. 150, the cartographer and astronomer Ptolemy had plotted them on the twenty-seven maps of his first world atlas. Also for this landmark volume, Ptolemy listed all the place names in an index, in alphabetical order, with the latitude and longitude of each--as well as he could gauge them from travelers' reports. Ptolemy himself had only an armchair appreciation of the wider world. A common misconception of his day held that anyone living below the Equator would melt into deformity from the horrible heat.

The Equator marked the zero-degree parallel of latitude for Ptolemy. He did not choose it arbitrarily but took it on higher authority from his predecessors, who had derived it from nature while observing the motions of the heavenly bodies. The sun, moon, and planets pass almost directly overhead at the Equator. Likewise the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, two other famous parallels, assume their positions at the sun's command. They mark the northern and southern boundaries of the sun's apparent motion over the course of the year.

Ptolemy was free, however, to lay his prime meridian, the zero-degree longitude line, wherever he liked. He chose to run it through the Fortunate Islands (now called the Canary & Madeira Islands) off the northwest coast of Africa. Later mapmakers moved the prime meridian to the Azores and to the Cape Verde Islands, as well as to Rome, Copenhagen, Jerusalem, St. Petersburg, Pisa, Paris, and Philadelphia, among other places, before it settled down at last in London.