Rating: 
Summary: Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Too Much of a good thing
Review: With a life long fascination toward those things mathematical, scientific and historical, I approached Peter Galison's book with happy expectations. Investing three days in its reading and finding much new material of interest, I have no problem with Mr. Galison's credentials as a scholar and historian of science. Sadly, what is admirable regarding his book has been seriously compromised by Galison's maddening redundancy and deluge of verbosity. How many times need he remind us that Poincare was trained at the Ecole Polytechnique and headed the Bureau des Longitudes, or that Einstein was more than just a clerk at the Swiss Patent Office where he received valuable experience regarding clock synchronization? Though some reviewers found the book overly technical, I would have appreciated more detail in the thoughts and experiments of the two protagonists, as well as more information than was given regarding the contributions and lives of other significant players such as Minkowski, Maxwell, Lorentz and Mach. While the notes, bibliography, and Galison's insights attest to his dedication and knowledge, the 328 pages of text, for what they contained, could easily have been reduced by 75 to 100 pages, if not more. I can only wonder if the author was simply churning out text to meet the obligations of a book contract. Besides being personally frustrating --because I truly appreciated much of what he presented-- this excess, as I forced myself to read through the final pages, became laughable. Before he publishes his next book, I strongly suggest Gallison take a freshman course in journalism at his university, Harvard, so that he might be more sensitive to the literary advantages of trimming the fat!
Rating:
Summary: In the middle ground
Review: Writing about science for laypersons is a tricky business, especially with regard to the scientific accuracy of the exposition and the human dimension of the characters. In the first instance, the author must choose between a superficial approach, full of analogies, fit for beginners, at the risk of boring the initiated, and a more elaborate treatment, intended for someone already familiar with the subject, that will probably scare the uninitiated. As to the characters, the author may reduce the scientists to a secondary role and concentrate on the results of research or fill the narrative with personal details about the people involved. The first choice will please the scientific-minded, while the second can make the reading more attractive to the humanists.
My main criticism of the book Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time is that the author does not make up his mind about the two points mentioned above. The long expositions about relativity and chaos do not bring any new contribution to the subject; the best popular books on relativity were written by Einstein himself, while chaos theory is brilliant reviewed by James Gleick in his best-selling Chaos: Making a New Science. At the same time, the wording is sometimes confusing for beginners. As to the biographical aspect of the work, several personal anecdotes on Einstein's and Poincaré 's lives are included (some utterly irrelevant), but the book does not dwell on the rich personalities of these two giants of science.
In short: trying to please everybody, the author wrote a book that possibly will please nobody
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