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Title: Calendar: : Humanity's Epic Struggle To Determine A True And Accurate Year by David E. Duncan ISBN: 0380793245 Publisher: Bard Books Pub. Date: 08 June, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.75
Rating: 2
Summary: Of dates, times, people and places...
Comment: There are a number of things I wish someone told me before I picked up this book, and here are some of them. This is NOT a book about the mathematics or the science behind the creation of the Calendar and the process of measuring time. Rather it is a long winded and one sided rambling history of the creation of the Gregorian Calendar in its present form. The book is too heavily European centric and Christian centric. It relegates all other histories of the measurement of time, such as the Mayans, the Indians, the Chinese, the Arabic etc to at most a chapter each. Further, the entire book is about the impact of the Church on the creation of the Calendar due to the need to fix Easter, and gives amiss to factors such as sea navigation, intercultural trade links etc, which were just as critical in the search for a universal time. Instead these are treated as anecdotes to illustrate the problems of a non-universal time, more as effects of changes made by the Church, rather than socio-cultural causes that led to the need for a Calendar.
In addition to all the above, the writing style makes the book a true chore to read. Filled with names, dates, names of towns and references to texts, paragraphs become extremely overloaded with junk information for anyone except the scholar interested in making chronological research notes. The other aspect that makes plain reading difficult is the frequently occurring capitals and years within paranthesis. A sample paragraph, picked almost at random is below.
"The bull itself was written in the fall of 1581, mostly by Pedro Chacon. On 20th October 1581 , he sent a draft from Turino to Cardinal Sirleto in Rome. Chacon then died a few days later, leaving the final version of the bull to be written by member Vincenzo di Lauri. Sirleto also dispatched Antionio Lilius, Aloysius's brother, to work with the pope's aides on the final bull at Mondragone, Gregory's favorite villa outside of Rome "
The good part of the book is that for someone unexposed to the frailties of time-measurement, this is definitely an eye opener in showing how recent the phenomenon of a universal time is. But even in the book being a non-scientific exposition, it falls far short of its own blurb which proudly announces the decision by Mao Zedong to accept the Gregorian Calendar as a seminal event, one which is treated in its entirety in a couple of paragraphs as compared to the entire book about the habits of monks and the "Ecclesiastical history of the English".Worth a read, not a buy though.
Rating: 4
Summary: Fascinating history!
Comment: Although ostensibly about a very narrow subject, David Ewing Duncan's Calendar: Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year tells a much broader story. This fine book combines both intellectual and social history with science, with the ultimate issue being "how do we define and measure a year." This is not a simple question scientifically, and the input of religion makes it more difficult still. For example, the most holy of days for Christians is Easter, yet the formula used to determine Easter was based, in part, on the spring equinox. The calendar in use before Pope Gregory was not quite accurate, with the result that Easter in the sixteenth century was being celebrated, according to astronomers, ten days "off." Science and religion have never been particularly comfortable bedfellows (one only needs to recall Galileo), so any "reform" was not as simple as it might seem. Duncan tells an excellent story, and what he does best is place in full context the seemingly narrow question of how we set the year. Although seemingly about a narrow subject, this is a wide-ranging and insightful work of history, ably written.
Rating: 4
Summary: Enjoyable book on a fascinating subject
Comment: I agree with all of the criticisms by previous reviewers -- there are some easily caught errors (which speaks to poor editing as much as anything) and some goofy narrative speculation (not only the reindeer-clad moon-watching Cro-Magnon but also the weary Roman foot soldier). I started the book several times and, confronting these weaknesses, put it down again. But I always wound up going back because the subject is so interesting, and did eventually finish the book.
Having acknowledged the faults, though, I must say that I learned a lot reading this book, which is filled with interesting anecdotes as well as respectful nods to the many people who contributed to the development of our present-day calendar. The author does a good job of balancing specific information with the big picture, and one learns quite a bit about the history of Europe and the Catholic Church (and other areas and institutions to a lesser extent).
There is a good index.
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Title: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar by Duncan Steel ISBN: 0471404217 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 08 December, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Mapping Time: The Calendar and Its History by E. G. Richards ISBN: 0192862057 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: May, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist, or How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little Bit Differently by Robert V. Levine ISBN: 0465026427 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: September, 1998 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: Time's Pendulum: From Sundials to Atomic Clocks, the Fascinating History of Timekeeping and How Our Discoveries Changed the World by Jo Ellen Barnett ISBN: 0156006499 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: March, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Calendrical Calculations: The Millennium Edition by Edward M. Reingold, Nachum Dershowitz ISBN: 0521777526 Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr (Pap Txt) Pub. Date: 01 July, 2001 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
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