Rating: 
Summary: Short and yet comprehensive and fascinating book
Review: This book is short and reads fast, but it covers its topic--how the compass came about and how navigation was changed by its use--very well. It talks about how navigation worked before the compass (dispelling the myth that ships hugged the coastline to avoid getting lost). It looks worldwide for evidence of magnets used for direction finding throughout history, not always for use in navigation. All in all, a fun and informative book.
Rating:
Summary: Short and yet comprehensive and fascinating book
Review: This book is short and reads fast, but it covers its topic--how the compass came about and how navigation was changed by its use--very well. It talks about how navigation worked before the compass (dispelling the myth that ships hugged the coastline to avoid getting lost). It looks worldwide for evidence of magnets used for direction finding throughout history, not always for use in navigation. All in all, a fun and informative book.
Rating: 
Summary: No riddle. No story.
Review: What a little mess of a book. You see, as it turns out, there isn't really much of a riddle to the invention of the compass. In fact, there isn't really much of a story to the invention of the compasss, or if there is, Dr. Aczel has not stumbled upon it.So, in order to fill out the pages of this small book, the author spins some unrelated stories that he then tries to somehow pin to the "riddle of the compass." For instance, we are treated to a history of Venice from the Romans to Napolean. Why? Well it seems that as seafaring people, the Venetians probably USED the compass. Or another entire chapter on the travels of Marco Polo to China that ends by noting -- not that Marco Polo had ANYTHING to do with the compass -- but that his travels "prove the feasibility of transport between China and the West. [Polo's] journeys underscore the likelihood that sometime between the Roman era and his own peiord a compass would have arrived in Europe among the many goods that traveled the routes he and his father and uncle took in the late Middle Ages." (I guess I was under the impression that the existence of SOME East-West trade during the Middle Ages was pretty well-accepted. But the Polo trip fills 12 pages of text.) In these types of books, the relevant digressions are often the essence of what makes for fascinating reading. But here the digressions are almost comically tagential. One feels that Dr. Aczel, if assigned to explicate the story of Little Red Riding Hood, would somehow find his way to a discussion of McCarty-era red-baiting in the little town of Hood, Oregon. Because there is little to say on the topic, the author struggles to make what might have been a magazine article into a book. As a consequence, the story being told feels silly and the book is poorly organized and frustrating to read.
Rating:
Summary: No riddle. No story.
Review: What a little mess of a book. You see, as it turns out, there isn't really much of a riddle to the invention of the compass. In fact, there isn't really much of a story to the invention of the compasss, or if there is, Dr. Aczel has not stumbled upon it. So, in order to fill out the pages of this small book, the author spins some unrelated stories that he then tries to somehow pin to the "riddle of the compass." For instance, we are treated to a history of Venice from the Romans to Napolean. Why? Well it seems that as seafaring people, the Venetians probably USED the compass. Or another entire chapter on the travels of Marco Polo to China that ends by noting -- not that Marco Polo had ANYTHING to do with the compass -- but that his travels "prove the feasibility of transport between China and the West. [Polo's] journeys underscore the likelihood that sometime between the Roman era and his own peiord a compass would have arrived in Europe among the many goods that traveled the routes he and his father and uncle took in the late Middle Ages." (I guess I was under the impression that the existence of SOME East-West trade during the Middle Ages was pretty well-accepted. But the Polo trip fills 12 pages of text.) In these types of books, the relevant digressions are often the essence of what makes for fascinating reading. But here the digressions are almost comically tagential. One feels that Dr. Aczel, if assigned to explicate the story of Little Red Riding Hood, would somehow find his way to a discussion of McCarty-era red-baiting in the little town of Hood, Oregon. Because there is little to say on the topic, the author struggles to make what might have been a magazine article into a book. As a consequence, the story being told feels silly and the book is poorly organized and frustrating to read.
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