Rating: 
Summary: A fascinating read.
Review: A previous reviewer has pointed out that much of what is described in the book is coincidence. This is true but misses the point entirely. The author does not mean to imply cause and effect; the world is too complex for that. The point is that there are several sets of scattered events that can be joined together; the fascinating thing is that such events and connections exist in the first place. Burke gives examples of such, and does so in such a way that you know he is only sampling from a much larger collection of them.
For example, the following sequence of events comes from the first chapter of the book:
Rowland Hill is best known for introducing the idea of postage stamps. The first printer that the British government hired was an American named Jacob Perkins, who later turned his new printing techniques to the problem of mass producing printed cotton cloth. For this he used a special gum imported from West Africa called Senegal gum. This was made possible by the French who had colonized that part of the world. That in turn was made possible by the 17th century statesman called Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who modernized much of France and in particular its navy. He was responsible for the building of the Canal du Midi that cut a swathe in France from the Atlantic to the Med. One of the engineers who worked on this massive undertaking was Sebastien Vauban, a brilliant inventor who also came up with a new method of siege warfare that was used by French and American troops to defeat the British at Yorktown. The American victory led to a huge number of loyalists fleeing to Nova Scotia. One of them was Abraham Kunders, who saw an opportunity in transporting the other group of refugees sweeping into that part of the world, namely Scots who had been kicked off their lands. After some time this transatlantic traffic was beginning to wane. Meanwhile, Hill's Penny Post had just begun, and Kunders was quick to realize that this would mean a huge amount of mail requiring transportation across the Atlantic, and made sure his company was there to ship a good deal of it. This made him rich, and started a successful family business which by the twentieth century and a clerical error was the Cunard shipping company, that built such well known liners as the Lustiania and the Queen Elizabeth II.
And that's just part of the first chapter, remember.
Rating:
Summary: The Pinball Effect - another stellar work by Burke
Review: Although, I'm not even finished yet, I know I'll be re-reading this at some time to take advantage of the inspired gateways scattered throughout the text. I remember watching the original 'Connections' series on PBS years ago, and his work fascinated me even then. This work is easily readable, and makes itself readily available to young and old, the scientifically minded and those just looking for a good read. 'Pinball' is a fun excursion through science, technology, and history! If you don't realize just how connected life is, this book will certainly open your eyes to the web of a world in which we live.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing After "Connections" and "Day Universe Changed"
Review: Burke's companion volume to the Connections-2 TV series mimicsthe failings of that series, while failing to live up to hisstandard set in his two previous ones.
The great insight that Burke supposedly brings to this book is that technological, scientific, and cultural development are all intertwined, and that individual achievements are only made possible by many previous advances brought together unexpectedly. But readers of "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed" already know this. So Burke adds hypertext to the book with indices in the margins. It's a cute idea, and well-executed, but actually following these links would destroy any cohesion in the stories Burke is trying to tell. If there were cohesion, that is. "Connections" told stories often stretching over centuries, and if you couldn't guess how you were getting there (part of the fun, of course), you at least knew where you were going. "Day" used essentially the same insight, but each chapter had a unifying theme: a particular revolutionary insight that changed our world view. "Pinball" has neither. Perhaps because Burke only had 30 minutes rather than an hour as in the previous shows, he rushed through the same amount of material twice as fast, barely pausing for breath. He doesn't stop to review where we've been, and in the first chapter, each leap takes us backwards, rather than forwards. The chop-chop style might work for MTV, but left me feeling that "Pinball" was not "Connections", but even less of the same.
Rating: 
Summary: The Web of Life
Review: Everything has a purpose and a lead to another is the basic concept of this text. The Pinball Effect by James Burke, is a very interesting piece. It is incredibly phenomenal how Mr. Burke is able to connect a normal house hold item or a modern idea to a possible invention or idea which is completely irrelevant to end product. The New York Times Book Review says, "The Pinball Effect ranges over everything from higher philosophy.... trivia like ballpoint pens, wigs, and "a machine for boring out water-pump cylinders."" James Burke's masterpiece gives the reader a sense of history and science intertwined with philosophy.
It wasn't until after I read this book, that I was able realize how much my daily life affects those around me. A great example would be if I didn't even write this review. Now if I didn't write this review, you didn't read this review. Thus you wouldn't be sitting at your desktop glaring at the screen. Though my example seems to take a product in just a few days or hours, the example illustrated by Burke are elapsed over hundreds of years.
Within the first few pages Burke has you thinking about your life and the life around you. Right of the bat he illustrates that life is like a spider web. Everything is connected together. He explains that in order to go from point A to point B, one might have to go to point C, point D, and point E just to get to point B.
Though The Pinball Effect sounds reasonable to consider, there are a few things wrong with the idea. Mr. Burke concludes that if these things are intertwined by the pinball effect then everything else is involved also. With this idea he is committing the fallacy of hasty generalization. Burke assumes that everything is connected on the web of life. But how is that proved.
Overall, the book is very enjoyable and very difficult to put down. It is very exciting to see how irrelevant objects and ideas are connected together, even though his idea does create a fallacy. I personally would read this book again.
Rating:
Summary: The Web of Life
Review: Everything has a purpose and a lead to another is the basic concept of this text. The Pinball Effect by James Burke, is a very interesting piece. It is incredibly phenomenal how Mr. Burke is able to connect a normal house hold item or a modern idea to a possible invention or idea which is completely irrelevant to end product. The New York Times Book Review says, "The Pinball Effect ranges over everything from higher philosophy.... trivia like ballpoint pens, wigs, and "a machine for boring out water-pump cylinders."" James Burke's masterpiece gives the reader a sense of history and science intertwined with philosophy.
It wasn't until after I read this book, that I was able realize how much my daily life affects those around me. A great example would be if I didn't even write this review. Now if I didn't write this review, you didn't read this review. Thus you wouldn't be sitting at your desktop glaring at the screen. Though my example seems to take a product in just a few days or hours, the example illustrated by Burke are elapsed over hundreds of years.
Within the first few pages Burke has you thinking about your life and the life around you. Right of the bat he illustrates that life is like a spider web. Everything is connected together. He explains that in order to go from point A to point B, one might have to go to point C, point D, and point E just to get to point B.
Though The Pinball Effect sounds reasonable to consider, there are a few things wrong with the idea. Mr. Burke concludes that if these things are intertwined by the pinball effect then everything else is involved also. With this idea he is committing the fallacy of hasty generalization. Burke assumes that everything is connected on the web of life. But how is that proved.
Overall, the book is very enjoyable and very difficult to put down. It is very exciting to see how irrelevant objects and ideas are connected together, even though his idea does create a fallacy. I personally would read this book again.
Rating:
Summary: Brains or balls?
Review: History of technology or history as technology, this book is an entertaining guide through the human adventure of the past few centuries. You may quibble with precise cause and effect connections the author proposes but the overwhelming effect is to drive home one irrefutable message: "We all live on the great dynamic web of change". No other book that I have ever read justifies better the first sentence in its introduction (not even the Tale of Two Cities)
But who has made the next connection, ie that the pinball effect is another manifestation of the Howard Bloom's Global Brain (ISBN: 0471419192)? Once you dispose of the preconception that brains have to be conscious then you can better see that technological development is the learning experience of our collective brain. The balls flying from pin to pin are the interactions of agents in the complex adaptive system that is modern civilisation. Treat the book as fun and you will see connections that you were never aware existed. Treat the book as a guide and you will be lead on a non-linear path through the history of ideas, invention and technology. Treat the book as recipes for invention and you will find there are no rules. Treat the book as mind food and you will realise that the human condition is more interesting and meaningful than any fundamentalist has ever dreamed of... But read it, dip into it, return to it and follow up some of the exciting ideas that may find a new home in the next century.
Rating: 
Summary: Oops! check your science Mr Burke
Review: It seems the author has taken a truckload of creative license in writing this book- or doesn't have a clue about the basics. One of the more amusing errors- from p34: "... In 1952 Francis Crick and James Watson were able to confirm the three-dimensional structure of a molecule of protein. They saw that it took the form of a double helix... Their X-ray diffraction pattern confirmed the existence of the DNA molecule"
Perhaps someone should mention to the author that Crick and Watson actually confirmed the 3D structure of DNA, not protein ! If Burke could make such a big, big mistake about such publicly known science, imagine the errors that could lurke beneath some of the more obscure discoveries he describes !
Rating:
Summary: Connection does not equal causation!
Review: It's been some time since I read this book, but I was recently reminded of it. I like Burke's pinwheeling (or pinballing, rather) style, jumping from topic to topic and making what are, indeed, often very interesting connections. The reason I rate this book so low, however, is that often Burke sums up a series of connections by implying -- or sometimes directly stating -- that the first event in the chain caused, by means of the intermediate steps, the last. This is often not at all the case; the connections between steps may have had no causal relationship, but simply meant that a person was working in the same city, or some other such interesting but not causally relevant connection. So in short, the chains of connections themselves make for fun reading, but don't trust the summaries. "Correlation does not equal causation," to quote an old statistics maxim; in the case of The Pinball Effect, connection doesn't always equal causation, either.
Rating:
Summary: Pinball Effect - Fractal Tour Through Inventive History
Review: James Burke's The Pinball Effect is a literary fractal through inventive history. The book seems not to follow any particular pattern, but after finishing the book the reader can look back and see a distinct orderliness. Creativity and openness begets creativity. I read this book as one would read a novel, but Pinball can be analyzed from several perspectives. Invention and time can be easily traced through seemingly unrelated events in Burke's writing. More than once I thought I would single out an invention connection, but the next story amazed me even more. Easy to read, the book lends itself to deeper analysis in tracing humans' journeys, origins, and light bulb moments. Two things impressed me about the people who were inventive: 1. They availed themselves to other creative people. and 2. They were able to see new things because they looking for them.
Rating:
Summary: Much better than his connections program.
Review: Of course, everyone knows before we start this book that everything is connected in several ways to everything else. The Real skill is in finding these connections and telling about them in an interesting way. Well James Burke as editor, does this with great skill. I first read the book straight through. Then I came back and read with the hyper-links. Sure enough, you get different perspectives. Then you add the links that he did not think of. I am ready for the next book.
By the way, James Burke was not the first to think this way. You should really read "The Ascent of Man" by Jacob Bronowski ISBN: 0316109339. It was used as a Humanities course in a local joiner collage.
|
