Rating: 
Summary: From a geologist
Review: I have highly recommendeded this book to my friends as a means to get excited about geology. William Smith became interested in geology because of his work in the coal mines, and went on to create a highly accurate, beautiful map of England. I read this book in 2 days, as Simon Winchester is a fantastic writer (I did skip the chapter about his personal experiences, though) and I feel he brings complicated geologic concepts to the level that any reader could understand (although this is contested by some of the reviews here on Amazon). Simon outlines how difficult it must have been for William Smith, not knowing basic geologic principles, but then taking on this monumental task with little education and only his love of his country (and rocks). It was inspirational to me as a geologist.
Rating: 
Summary: What a Presentation...
Review: This is a potentially fascinating book for readers who like biography, geology, landscape, England, rocks, or fossil ammonites. All right, I admit I was suckered by the cover: the hb dust jacket unfolds into a single large geological map of England, Wales, and southern Scotland! It is The Map That Changed the World in 1815 by revealing the rock strata beneath an entire country: the existence of time and order, of coal beds, building stone, ores, and soil types, all now made predictable. The fact this 1/13th size version of the immense hand made and coloured original by William "Strata" Smith won't stand magnification might have warned me about the text within. Once beyond the exciting promise of the clever jacket and quality presentation I was increasingly disappointed. Winchester's biographical construction of Smith's life, while chronological overall, casts Smith's remarkable rise from the farm, and his wonderful scientific observation and insight, as a morality play against 18th century class prejudice and religion ("the blind acceptance of absurdity"!) taken quite out of historical context. Aside from Smith never having been involved in religious controversy (see pp. 195-96), the authorial tactics make it hard to follow Smith's story rather than Winchester's arch exegesis. Despite the frequent assertions of how earth-shaking was Smith's map, the book is such a farrago of description, quotation, flashforward, biography, travel, snide remark, foreshadowment, reconstruction, admiration, speculation, flashback, asides, suggestion, British nostalgia, coincidence, and digressive (but not scholarly) footnotes that the revolutionary consequences of Smith's innovations in stratigraphy, fossil assemblage, and mapping are buried and never come across coherently and convincingly. Because the author implies that Smith's recorded life and journal were boring and pedestrian, he must think it necessary to gussy up the very real scientific discoveries with this potpourri of diversions. Nevertheless, Winchester's own text is mared by banality, repetition, and common cliche, and larded with his anachronistic prejudices. I'm glad I read this book, but the book's handsome presentation set my expectations way too high. I don't know that I've ever encountered an author who so gets in the way of his subject. His choice of supplemental illustrations also turns out to be off the mark, largely lacking maps of place names (which are particularly obscure to non-English folk) and entirely lacking views of the specific countryside that was critical to Smith's revelations. Other contemporary geologists are used as foils for the hidden excellence of Smith, rather than to fill out the real context and consequences of his discoveries. So, if you want to read something truly exciting about geology or landscape, seek out John McPhee's four books describing and interpreting a cross section of America. For a better understanding of Smith's historical context, see The Birth of the Modern by Paul Johnson.
Rating: 
Summary: Fairly interesting story swamped by dreadful writing
Review: It's a matter of taste, but I'm mystified by people who find Winchester's writing "charming." The author's cardinal rule seems to be: "When in doubt, slather on another thick coat of adjectives, adverbs, and clichés." This kind of prose is too politely described as turgid, florid, and repetitive.
I wouldn't normally review a book after reading 1/4 of it, but I feel about this one the way I do after watching 20 minutes of a movie, and the direction, acting, and story are already tired and weak. It's usually a waste of time to stick it out on the off chance of an improvement.
Given that, I can't comment on whether the underlying story will come close to living up to its grandiose title, but I can say that I have a hard time trusting an author on the big picture once I've seen him get the details wrong in areas that I am intimately familiar with (e.g. coal mining in this case).
As several other readers suggested, John McPhee is an incomparably better writer and researcher, on geology or any other topic he cares to tackle.
Rating:
Summary: Great science, great history
Review: William Smith learned how to read the layers of rock beneath Great Britain and created the world's first stratigraphic map. He did indeed "change the world", because his map became the basis of so much fundamental research in geology and literally place the engineering of mines, bridges, canals, and skyscrapers on a sound basis. I enjoyed Winchester's description of England in the early 1800's, particularly the agricultural revolution resulting from the enclosure laws. Smith was known as the "drainer" because he advised landowners on the usefulness of their fields, based on his knowledge of the strata beneath them. Smith based his identification of strata on the fossils they contained. He found that sedimentary layers invariably contained fossils, that the fossils were characteristic for a given layer. Although he didn't spend much time speculating about it, Smith discovered evolution. If you are occasionally annoyed by Creationists who say that "evolution is just a theory" you'll find this book a delight and a resource.
Rating: 
Summary: English eccentrics
Review: What is it about England and its wonderful eccentric scientists? From Darwin and Newton to Harrison and Smith, these folks are just amazing - their love of what they did and their passion to solve a problem are astonishing. And it's not (necessarily) because they were paid to pursue their ventures, but because their curiosity made them do it.
Like Harrison in "Longitude", Smith in "The Map" sets out to solve a problem. In Smith's case it's nothing less than an entire geographical portrait of the British Isles. Never mind that nobody has ever done this, never mind that it will take most of his life, never mind that people will scoff at him, he just went out and did it. And in the process he created a revolution of thinking that we still use today.
The book lags a bit in places as it strive to balance the story of the passion with the details of the stones and fossils, but it's a great tale.
Rating:
Summary: Deadly dull
Review: I'm sorry, but not even Simon Winchester's earnest enthusiasm and lyrical prose can save this tale. It's just too dull. I got through about halfway, and couldn't finish. Winchester is a glorious writer in his twin histories of the Oxford English Dictionary. But here his subject is just too obscure and trivial, and try as he might, Winchester can't make it seem interesting.
Rating:
Summary: A review of the book about the map that changed the world
Review: Simon Winchester, the author of the deservedly best-selling *The Professor and the Madman*, writes in *The Map that Changed the World* about William Smith, who was dubbed in 1831--a bit belatedly--The Father of English Geology by the then president of the Geological Society of London. Smith's great work was an enormous--some 8 x 6 feet--geological map of England, the data for which Smith had spent a considerable part of his lifetime collecting single-handedly. The map, which delineates in splendid color the various strata of rock that underlie England, was the first of its kind. Smith himself was a maverick intellect for his understanding of both the implications of the strata for the history of the Earth and the importance to the rocks' identification of the fossils that could be collected from them. Smith also had an interesting personal history in that his great efforts for science were so unremunerative that he landed for some eleven weeks at the age of fifty in one of London's great debtors' prisons. Winchester makes much of this great irony in his book, that a monumental figure should be so ill-treated and so long unrespected during his lifetime. For all Smith's merits as a subject, however, Winchester's narrative is a bit of a slog. His emphasis is very often on the science of geology rather than the personality of Smith. This is reasonable enough given the subject matter of the book, but I, at least, frequently found the author's discussion difficult to follow. Winchester may, as a one-time student of geology at Oxford, have had too high an opinion of his layman readers' capacities. (Or I, of course, may not have been the proper audience for the book.) For those who are not geologically inclined, there may be more discussion of strata, however, than is palatable: "Below the 300 feet of chalk, Smith declaimed before the others, were first 70 feet of sand. Then 30 feet of clay. Then 30 more feet of clay and stone. And 15 feet of clay. Then 10 feet of the first of named rocks, forest marble. And 60 feet of freestone." And so on. Winchester's narrative does become more interesting toward the book's end, when Smith has, finally, published his map and he is imprisoned for debt--the great dramatic moment toward which the book has been leading. But Smith's stay in the King's Bench Prison is itself anticlimactic, because while Winchester alludes to its "horrors" earlier on, he finally describes debtors' prison as a sort of country club, where the indebted middle-class pass their time playing cards or bowling and drinking beer. Trying and embittering it may have been to be locked away while his possessions were riffled through and sold off, but it was evidently not horrific. Winchester's writing is at its most charming--and he does write charmingly--in the most personal section of the book, when he tells the story of his discovery at the age of six of an ammonite fossil. He and his fellow convent boys were led by the sisters of the Blessed Order of the Visitation on a miles-long walk to the sea, an expedition they undertook once a week. Winchester's account of the boys' riotous plunge into the sea shows just how nicely he can turn a phrase: "Up here there always seemed to be a cool onshore breeze blowing up and over the summit. It was tangy with salt and seaweed, and the way it cooled the perspiration was so blessed a feeling that we would race downhill into it with wing-wide arms, and it would muss our hair and tear at our uniform caps, and we would fly down toward the beach and to the surging Channel waves that chewed back and forth across the pebbles and the sand. "I seem to remember that by this point in the weekly expedition the dozen or so of us--all called by numbers, since the convent's peculiar regime forbade the use of names; I was simply 46--were well beyond caring what the nuns might think: The ocean was by now far too magnetic a temptation. Once in a while we might glance back at them as they stood, black and hooded like carrion crows, fingering their rosaries and muttering prayers or imprecations--but if they disapproved of us tearing off our gray uniforms and plunging headlong into the surf, so what? This was summer, here was the sea, and we were schoolboys--a combination of forces that even these storm troopers of the Blessed Visitation could not overwhelm." Perhaps Winchester will one day expand on this passage with further autobiographical fare.
Rating:
Summary: Fairly interesting story swamped by dreadful writing
Review: It's a matter of taste, but I'm mystified by people who find Winchester's writing "charming." The author's cardinal rule seems to be: "When in doubt, slather on another thick coat of adjectives, adverbs, and clichés." This kind of prose is too politely described as turgid, florid, and repetitive.
I wouldn't normally review a book after reading 1/4 of it, but I feel about this one the way I do after watching 20 minutes of a movie, and the direction, acting, and story are already tired and weak. It's usually a waste of time to stick it out on the off chance of an improvement.
Given that, I can't comment on whether the underlying story will come close to living up to its grandiose title, but I can say that I have a hard time trusting an author on the big picture once I've seen him get the details wrong in areas that I am intimately familiar with (e.g. coal mining in this case).
As several other readers suggested, John McPhee is an incomparably better writer and researcher, on geology or any other topic he cares to tackle.
Rating: 
Summary: pass on this title
Review: I had many hours of flying ahead of me and this was the wrong book to have taken. The fact that it was the only book I had gave me great incentive to like it. I didn't. I left it on the plane for someone more desperate than myself.
Rating:
Summary: Great science, great history
Review: William Smith learned how to read the layers of rock beneath Great Britain and created the world's first stratigraphic map. He did indeed "change the world", because his map became the basis of so much fundamental research in geology and literally place the engineering of mines, bridges, canals, and skyscrapers on a sound basis. I enjoyed Winchester's description of England in the early 1800's, particularly the agricultural revolution resulting from the enclosure laws. Smith was known as the "drainer" because he advised landowners on the usefulness of their fields, based on his knowledge of the strata beneath them. Smith based his identification of strata on the fossils they contained. He found that sedimentary layers invariably contained fossils, that the fossils were characteristic for a given layer. Although he didn't spend much time speculating about it, Smith discovered evolution. If you are occasionally annoyed by Creationists who say that "evolution is just a theory" you'll find this book a delight and a resource.
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