I was given A Sixth Sense while on a work visit to Schlumberger's research centre in Cambridge. It is a biography of Henri-Georges Doll, the brother-in-law of the two Schlumberger brothers who founded the company, and the key technical and scientific mind behind the company's development of well-logging techniques upon which its success is, in ( Read more... )

Continuing my quest to learn about the Age of Sail...

( Under the Cut )

The Command of the Ocean is the second of Rodger's books on the History of the Royal Navy, following on from The Safeguard of the Sea. Despite the fact the history has now reached the period I was particularly interested in (that involving baggy shirts and dapper waistcoats) I didn't enjoy this instalment nearly as much and, in places, found it ( Read more... )

Full disclosure. Marc Read and I are old friends. Our children, when not in rooms at opposite ends of the house, refusing to speak to each other, are good friends, so, you know...

New Stars for Old is a series of vignettes fictionalising the lives of famous astronomers. The vignettes range over a number of forms including letters and diaries, as ( Read more... )

For Reasons, I decided I wanted to know more about the Age of Sail, but along the way I somehow got side-tracked into the history of the Royal Navy. The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 660-1649 by N. A. M. Rodger, you will observe, stops short of the Age of Sail or at least those parts of it involving baggy sleeves and dapper ( Read more... )

kargicq recommended this book to me as a good introduction to the history of science and, since it was on Dad's bookshelves, I helped myself. It covers, essentially, the history of European science from Copernicus to the Chemical Revolution which, crucially, defines the period in which "scientific method" emerged and was refined.

( Some random ramblings under the cut, not assisted by the fact I seem to have lost the actual book itself )

I'm going to poke gentle fun at The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots' Invention of the Modern World by Arthur Herman so I feel I should start by saying that I actually think it is an excellent book. Having read a number of history textbooks on the Enlightenment period recently I think I can, hand-on-heart, say that from a layman's point of view ( Read more... )

The Code Book by Simon Singh is a tour through the history of codemaking and codebreaking, with the odd digression into Tudor politics and the translation of ancient languages. As such it pretty much does what it says on the tin. I've always been interested in cryptography and was happily entertained by it. I could follow all the descriptions of ( Read more... )

Catherine the Great by Simon Dixon is another fruit of the great parental book-shelf raid. I'm not quite sure why I picked up a book on her, as opposed to Frederick the Great (or even both of them). It turns out that this book isn't really a biography but more an examination of Catherine's methods of rulership ( Read more... )

I'm not sure how I came to possess Tracing your Home's History by Anthony Adolph. It claims to be excerpted for The Times so I suspect it fell out of a relative's paper and was passed on to me because of my interest in genealogy. It's basically, a few grammatical infelicities aside, a perfectly respectable run-down of useful sources for tracing ( Read more... )