Circles : Fifty Roundtrips Through History Technology Science Culture

Circles : Fifty Roundtrips Through History Technology Science Culture
by James Burke

Circles : Fifty Roundtrips Through History Technology Science Culture
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Book Summary Information

Author: James Burke
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2003-09-01
ISBN: 0743249763
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Book Reviews of Circles : Fifty Roundtrips Through History Technology Science Culture

Book Review: A Hasty Effort
Summary: 2 Stars

I am a James Burke fan from way back. I think his series "Connections" was a masterpiece. However, this book is a long way from a complete work. Other reviewers have dealt with the increasingly tenuous way he connects the dots and the masses of reworked Connections material, so I won't discuss that.

What I found most annoying was the hyper-chatty method of writing, as if he were just transcribing an oral presentation. The trouble with writing the same way you speak is that the written word doesn't preserve any of the rhythmic and tonal punctuation that allows listeners to parse it into a coherent message. I found many parts of the book garbled until I couldn't tell what he was trying to convey. If I had not seen Connections and not remembered his voice and style of speaking, I would have understood even less.

I know that professionally produced books have an editor between the author and the page, so I don't know whether to blame the editor for not being more forceful or blame the author for overriding the editor. But somebody messed up.

Summary of Circles : Fifty Roundtrips Through History Technology Science Culture

From the bestselling author of The Knowledge Web come fifty mesmerizing journeys into the history of technology, each following a chain of consequential events that ends precisely where it began. Whether exploring electromagnetic fields, the origin of hot chocolate, or DNA fingerprinting, these essays all illustrate the surprisingly circular nature of change.

In "Room with (Half) a View," for instance, Burke muses about the partly obscured railway bridge outside his home on the Thames, a musing which sets off a chain of thought that leads from the bridge's engineer to Samuel Morse, to firearms inventor Sam Colt, and finally to a trombonist named Gustav Holst, who once lived in the very house that blocks Burke's view.

So it goes with Burke's entertaining and informative essays as each one highlights the interconnectedness of seemingly unrelated events and innovations. Romantic poetry leads to brandy distillation; tonic water connects through Leibniz to the first explorers to reach the North Pole. This unique collection is sure to stimulate and delight history buffs, technophiles, and anyone else with a healthy intellectual curiosity.


Unlike Perry Mason, James Burke does not try to assemble watertight (if convoluted) cases. His essays in the history of technology are more like random walks, paeans to serendipity. In The Knowledge Web Burke attempted to duplicate on paper the feeling of inter- and cross-linking trends that you find in history and on the World Wide Web. The essays in Circles are more artificially restricted, topological circles that wrap around. A typical trip goes from the Space Shuttle to Skylab to Werner von Braun to feedback to digestion to lab animals to the Humane Society to sea rescues to charting sea currents to Foucault to astronomical photography to the solar corona to Skylab. Whew!

"There are two reasons why I make such play of the unstructured nature of history, but then, in this book, give it a formal shape," Burke says. "One reason is that otherwise these essays would have mirrored the serendipity I described, just going from anywhere to anywhere.... Choosing to go round in circles, and to end each story where it begins, lets me illustrate perhaps the most intriguing aspect of serendipity at work, which shows itself in the way in which history generates the most extraordinary coincidences." He might have added that trying to guess how Burke proposes to connect all this up makes these tales a game for reader as well as writer, a most educational amusement. --Mary Ellen Curtin

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