Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39223 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-04
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Simon Winchester has a very simple formula, of which The Map That Changed the World is a perfect example--namely that the history we have forgotten is infinitely more interesting than the history with which we are all familiar. After the success of The Surgeon of Crowthorne, which documented the life of WC Minor, the American surgeon and major contributor to the first Oxford English Dictionary, Winchester now turns his attention to William Smith, the 19th-century Briton who can justly lay claim to being the founding father of geology.

The book has all the usual attributes of a pacy historical read: a self-educated, unrecognised scientist spends years roaming the British countryside, compiling a map of the geological layers beneath the surface, only to have his ideas ripped off and to wind up homeless and penniless in Yorkshire with a wife who is going bonkers. And it gets better: in a bizarre Dickensian twist, Smith finally gets his just accolades when he is recognised by a kindly liberal nobleman and is reintroduced to London society as the geologist par excellence. Of itself, the story would be more than enough recommendation but there is a subtext running though the book that is in many ways just as compelling--namely, how some parts of history get written in stone and others in dust. Most secondary-school students get to learn of Charles Darwin and The Voyage of the Beagle. Yet how many people could stick their hands up and say they had heard of Smith? But is evolution any more important a field as geology? Is history ultimately an exercise in who has the best PR? Winchester may not have the answer, but he'll certainly make you think.--John Crace

Daily Telegraph, June 30, 2001
This book is a love song to geology... Winchester has written a stylish and engaging work of narrative history which I think is his best book yet

London Review of Books, August 9, 2001
Simon Winchester has done a considerable service to geology in rescuing Smith from comparative obsurity

Customer Reviews

Interesting but flawed biography
Simon Winchester tells the largely forgotten story of self-taught geologist William Smith, the father of modern geology. Though the "barely educated lower middle class scholar takes on academic and social establishments and (eventually) wins" formula is not exactly original, the book is pacy enough and the human and scientific interests well balanced enough to keep it an enthralling read.

William Smith was the son of an Oxfordshire blacksmith. His childhood fascination with rocks and fossils led to his employment as a surveyor of mines and builder of canals, and to his discovery that the rocks of his native county lay in strata, always in the same order and always bearing the same unique fossils in each layer. He theorised that this pattern would be replicated throughout Britain, and that the fossils themselves showed that the layers of rocks were layed down at different times. Though to the twenty-first century, this does not sound very revolutionary, to the late eighteenth, before Darwin and when Bishop Ussher's dating of the divine creation of the Earth to 4004 B.C. was still popularly accepted, it was unheard of.

Smith's reputation spread, and soon his professional services were in demand throughout the country, allowing him also to test his geological theories; he astonished his patrons by being able to predict almost on sight whether their lands held coal strata. His plan was to produce a map of the geology of the entire British Isles.

Unfortunately, financial imprudence and lack of social standing, as well as possibly the stigma of an apparently insane wife and the professional jealously of his rivals, damaged Smith's career to such an extent that he was imprisoned for debt. These circumstances are not so well covered by Winchester; I suspect that Smith's diary is by so much the primary source here that he is only able to retell the story Smith himself recorded. The details of the "nymphomaniac" wife, for example, are particularly scanty.

This is unfortunate. For the most part, the book is very lively, easy to read, and Smith's story seems to hold a personal fascination for Winchester. In part, this is explained by a central chapter containing a childhood memoir from the author, on his finding of an ammonite on a Dorset beach; this did, I have to say, sit rather uncomfortably in the middle of Smith's biography; it might just have worked better as a prologue. And the assertion that amateur palaeontology is "no more than the mark of the nerd" is hardly appropriate in such a book! We forgive Winchester his failings though; we are too busy routing for Smith.

Repetitive repetitive repetitive
I had to give up reading this book, which I found very interesting because I couldn't cope with the author labouring the point. Take this example from page 172 of my copy:

For anyone today to walk eastwards, from Dorset to Dover along this coastline, just as William Smith had walked eastwards along the Somerset Coal Canal from Dunkerton to Limpley Stoke some two centuries before, is to walk forwards in geological time - is to walk away from and out of the older rocks and towards and into the newer. The cliffs that ranged before me now were each made of rocks that were successively younger than those in the cliffs that ranged behind me. The more distantly ahead of me they ranged, the younger and younger they became - so that those lost in the shimmering haze of the afternoon belonged to whole stages and epochs of geological time that were far more recent than those beside and behind me.

Apart from the fact that the reader is by now quite familiar with the starting and finishing point of the Somerset Coal Canal and with the fact that Smith lived 200 years ago (this fact is repeated many times as either "200 years ago" or "two centuries before")the author has now told us that the rocks get younger as one walks from Dorset to Dover 4 times in one paragraph.

I just couldn't take it anymore!

Almost interesting
I really tried to enjoy this book, yet despite one failed and one successful attempt at finishing it, I was left ultimately disappointed.
The subject is potentially enthralling, but the writing style and pretension of the author result in a book that is repetitive and difficult to read.
I have two main objections to this book, first, the excessive use of footnotes on almost every page. Reading these notes results in a book that fails to flow, and is consequently difficult to read. Not reading these notes would involve ignoring almost a third of the provided text.
Second, the author’s over heightened self importance, leading to an entire chapter (in which the author discusses his finding of a fossil during childhood) that adds nothing to the book, and would be better removed entirely.
Essentially the author appears undecided as to whether this book is his personal autobiography, or the biography of William Smith.