Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(19)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I was riveted by this book, which shows the power of one man who challenges established thought on how the earth was made and realises that there was more to it than seven days. William Smith's observations in the mines and while building canals contributed greatly to the theory of evolution. Smith constructed a geological map that is not so very different from those in use today. If you are interested in geology or map making you will enjoy this read.

Additional biographical information shows how Smith struggled with life, fame and debt along the way.

Simon Winchester has rather made a name for himself taking offbeat and obscure topics and making them accessible and entertaining for the casual reader and I think this may be one of his better books. I actually read this particular history a number of years ago (and I recall enjoying it) but I think I got more out of it in subsequent reads. The difference, I think, is that in the interim between the first and later reads I also read a lot of books about creationism, Darwinian evolutionary theory and the impact an influence of modern geological science on those areas. After reading about the religious uproar which occurred once the immense age of the earth and the form of its structure began to contradict certain long held beliefs it was very interesting to see how the whole fuss got started.

I'm sorry, but not even Simon Winchester's earnest enthusiasm and lyrical prose can save this tale. It's just too dull. I got through about halfway, and couldn't finish.

Winchester is a glorious writer in his twin histories of the Oxford English Dictionary. But here his subject is just too obscure and trivial, and try as he might, Winchester can't make it seem interesting.

It's a matter of taste, but I'm mystified by people who find Winchester's writing "charming." The author's cardinal rule seems to be: "When in doubt, slather on another thick coat of adjectives, adverbs, and clichés." This kind of prose is too politely described as turgid, florid, and repetitive.
I wouldn't normally review a book after reading 1/4 of it, but I feel about this one the way I do after watching 20 minutes of a movie, and the direction, acting, and story are already tired and weak. It's usually a waste of time to stick it out on the off chance of an improvement.
Given that, I can't comment on whether the underlying story will come close to living up to its grandiose title, but I can say that I have a hard time trusting an author on the big picture once I've seen him get the details wrong in areas that I am intimately familiar with (e.g. coal mining in this case).
As several other readers suggested, John McPhee is an incomparably better writer and researcher, on geology or any other topic he cares to tackle.

I had many hours of flying ahead of me and this was the wrong book to have taken. The fact that it was the only book I had gave me great incentive to like it. I didn't. I left it on the plane for someone more desperate than myself.

William Smith learned how to read the layers of rock beneath Great Britain and created the world's first stratigraphic map. He did indeed "change the world", because his map became the basis of so much fundamental research in geology and literally place the engineering of mines, bridges, canals, and skyscrapers on a sound basis. I enjoyed Winchester's description of England in the early 1800's, particularly the agricultural revolution resulting from the enclosure laws. Smith was known as the "drainer" because he advised landowners on the usefulness of their fields, based on his knowledge of the strata beneath them.

Smith based his identification of strata on the fossils they contained. He found that sedimentary layers invariably contained fossils, that the fossils were characteristic for a given layer. Although he didn't spend much time speculating about it, Smith discovered evolution. If you are occasionally annoyed by Creationists who say that "evolution is just a theory" you'll find this book a delight and a resource.

Simon Winchester, the author of the deservedly best-selling *The Professor and the Madman*, writes in *The Map that Changed the World* about William Smith, who was dubbed in 1831--a bit belatedly--The Father of English Geology by the then president of the Geological Society of London. Smith's great work was an enormous--some 8 x 6 feet--geological map of England, the data for which Smith had spent a considerable part of his lifetime collecting single-handedly. The map, which delineates in splendid color the various strata of rock that underlie England, was the first of its kind. Smith himself was a maverick intellect for his understanding of both the implications of the strata for the history of the Earth and the importance to the rocks' identification of the fossils that could be collected from them.

Smith also had an interesting personal history in that his great efforts for science were so unremunerative that he landed for some eleven weeks at the age of fifty in one of London's great debtors' prisons. Winchester makes much of this great irony in his book, that a monumental figure should be so ill-treated and so long unrespected during his lifetime.

For all Smith's merits as a subject, however, Winchester's narrative is a bit of a slog. His emphasis is very often on the science of geology rather than the personality of Smith. This is reasonable enough given the subject matter of the book, but I, at least, frequently found the author's discussion difficult to follow. Winchester may, as a one-time student of geology at Oxford, have had too high an opinion of his layman readers' capacities. (Or I, of course, may not have been the proper audience for the book.) For those who are not geologically inclined, there may be more discussion of strata, however, than is palatable: "Below the 300 feet of chalk, Smith declaimed before the others, were first 70 feet of sand. Then 30 feet of clay. Then 30 more feet of clay and stone. And 15 feet of clay. Then 10 feet of the first of named rocks, forest marble. And 60 feet of freestone." And so on.

Winchester's narrative does become more interesting toward the book's end, when Smith has, finally, published his map and he is imprisoned for debt--the great dramatic moment toward which the book has been leading. But Smith's stay in the King's Bench Prison is itself anticlimactic, because while Winchester alludes to its "horrors" earlier on, he finally describes debtors' prison as a sort of country club, where the indebted middle-class pass their time playing cards or bowling and drinking beer. Trying and embittering it may have been to be locked away while his possessions were riffled through and sold off, but it was evidently not horrific.

Winchester's writing is at its most charming--and he does write charmingly--in the most personal section of the book, when he tells the story of his discovery at the age of six of an ammonite fossil. He and his fellow convent boys were led by the sisters of the Blessed Order of the Visitation on a miles-long walk to the sea, an expedition they undertook once a week. Winchester's account of the boys' riotous plunge into the sea shows just how nicely he can turn a phrase:

"Up here there always seemed to be a cool onshore breeze blowing up and over the summit. It was tangy with salt and seaweed, and the way it cooled the perspiration was so blessed a feeling that we would race downhill into it with wing-wide arms, and it would muss our hair and tear at our uniform caps, and we would fly down toward the beach and to the surging Channel waves that chewed back and forth across the pebbles and the sand.

"I seem to remember that by this point in the weekly expedition the dozen or so of us--all called by numbers, since the convent's peculiar regime forbade the use of names; I was simply 46--were well beyond caring what the nuns might think: The ocean was by now far too magnetic a temptation. Once in a while we might glance back at them as they stood, black and hooded like carrion crows, fingering their rosaries and muttering prayers or imprecations--but if they disapproved of us tearing off our gray uniforms and plunging headlong into the surf, so what? This was summer, here was the sea, and we were schoolboys--a combination of forces that even these storm troopers of the Blessed Visitation could not overwhelm."

Perhaps Winchester will one day expand on this passage with further autobiographical fare.

Stacey gave me this book last year for Christmas. It is written by Simon Winchester, who also wrote The Professor and the Madman, which was a fascinating book about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. This story was a bit more challenging to get through. I did learn many interesting things, but the topic was just not as thrilling, nor was the story or the telling as compelling. And clearly the title engages in hyperbole. Not entirely sure I can reccomend this book in general, perhaps if your really into geology.

One interesting fact: the largest division of time is eon, of which there have been four, the current being the Phanerozoic, which means "visible life". The division goes from eon, to era, periods and epochs.

Disappointing sums it up for me. If I wasn't interested in geology already I would be even more disappointed. The author could have done more with this interesting saga in the history of geology if he hadn't tried to blow it up into something more earth-shaking than it really was. I think his editors were asleep with all the repetitive foreshadowing and over-the-top declarations of at-the-time unappreciated genius. For a good geology read try John McPhee.

What is it about England and its wonderful eccentric scientists? From Darwin and Newton to Harrison and Smith, these folks are just amazing - their love of what they did and their passion to solve a problem are astonishing. And it's not (necessarily) because they were paid to pursue their ventures, but because their curiosity made them do it.
Like Harrison in "Longitude", Smith in "The Map" sets out to solve a problem. In Smith's case it's nothing less than an entire geographical portrait of the British Isles. Never mind that nobody has ever done this, never mind that it will take most of his life, never mind that people will scoff at him, he just went out and did it. And in the process he created a revolution of thinking that we still use today.
The book lags a bit in places as it strive to balance the story of the passion with the details of the stones and fossils, but it's a great tale.