Product Description

Before fate intervened, Joseph Needham was a distinguished biochemist at Cambridge University, married to a fellow scientist. In 1937 he was asked to supervise a young Chinese student named Lu Gwei-Djen, and in that moment began the two greatest love affairs of his life – Miss Lu, and China. Miss Lu inspired Needham to travel to China where he initially spent three dangerous years as a wartime diplomat. By the end of his life, Needham had become the pre-eminent China scholar of all time, a truly global figure, travelling endlessly and honoured by all. And in 1989, after a fifty-two year affair, he finally married the woman who had first inspired his passion. Bomb, Book and Compass is Simon Winchester at his best – at once a magnificent portrait of one man's remarkable life and a riveting exploration of the country that so engaged him.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #152795 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

USA Today
'Needham's story is phenomenal. This is the rare book where you wish the author had included more detail, not less'

Wall Street Journal
'Captivating. Makes the most obscure topic seem as if it should be on the front of that day's newspaper'

Los Angeles Times
'A charming literary adventure ... Winchester is an engaging writer and a brisk storyteller'

Customer Reviews

A bit disappointing
Joseph Needham was obviously a brilliant and fascinating man. However this book left me with the impression that perhaps he did not leave enough personal (as opposed to academic) material to make a really satisfactory biography. While much of the material in the book is interesting, I was not left with much sense of what 'made him tick'. The account is also very patchy - a lot of detail about a few relatively short episodes in his life, with long gaps between them - and in places spends several pages talking about someone else who is relatively peripheral to the story. I'd recommend it to people with an interest in Needham's work, but not as a great piece of biography.

A great tale
I found this to be a great and gripping story about the creation of a masterpiece of academic work. I did not read this as a biography rather how an academic stumbled into a new life in and around China and wrote up the fascinating science and civilisation that he found there. Rather like the book about the creation of the Shorter English Dictionary - probably more interesting than the work it is introducing. A good read.