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.
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.
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.
Rating: 
Summary: Will jumpstart any lazy brain to life.
Review: One can't help but admire James Burke. In his TV show, he managed to entangle the viewer in an astonishing web of interrelated events, not letting him go until the very last thread was weaved. Although I didn't expect this effect to occur in his books (since much of the show's success owes to the visuals, including Burke's personal image of a basically nice fella, anyone's ideal uncle), it did. I was entangled in this book from the first chapter until the end, though occasionally smirking to myself when comming across some truly far-fetched connection (you can't take every part of the web all that seriously) . Regardless, his trademark erudite-though-slightly-tounge-in-cheek style makes this book extremely informative, but most important, VERY fun to read.
Rating:
Summary: Interconnectedness of history
Review: Since Chaos burst upon the intellectual consciousness of the twentieth century, examples of the butterfly effect have inundated our lives. Chaotic systems exhibit a type of behavior where vanishingly-small perturbations in initial conditions result in wild and unpredictable alterations in a system's final state. The butterfly in China, flapping its wings, results in a hurricane off the coast of Florida 100 years later. James Burke takes us on an intersected voyage through the web of history, and in the process shows the intricately connected nature of our lives in a chaotic mishmash of intersecting events. The mental imagery I concocted while reading his book was one of a small worm making its way through a biscuit of shredded wheat. With thousands of intersecting strands, and billions of route possibilities open at each juncture, my biscuit gives a feel for the intricate connection that every event in history shares with everything else. In fact, Burke has written his book from the worm's perspective, with branch points identified in the margins so you can follow a thread (instead of the book) as it weaves its way through history. You do not need to read this book sequentially, and quite possibly might choose to read it worm style rather than cover to cover. When I first began Burke's book I looked for the obvious connections, but soon learned that was not his objective. Though he illustrates obvious connections, much of the interelatedness in Burke's book deals with subtle effects that changed people's lives and resulted in dramatic changes in history. Sometimes the stories become so intricate I found myself taking notes so I could mentally trace back through the web of events. Most of the historical events he covers relate in some way to scientific or technical achievements and discoveries. In some of these, I found myself confused about the terminology used. Burke is not always clear when he comments about a particular discovery, whether he is making a statement about the way things are viewed today, or how they were viewed by the original discoverers. Because of this, I found myself sometimes irritated by technically incorrect descriptions. For example, on page 198 Burke says: "There was only one thing that would reflect radio waves besides metal reflectors like the ones Hertz had used: ionized atoms, which had lost one or more of their electrons. These atoms became positively charged and would reflect electronic signals (which were negative)." While it is true that ions are positively charged, radio waves are not negative. In another place, he describes voltage as charge (see page 186). He also mentions, off handedly, that collimated laser beams spread by only "a few feet" over the distance between the earth and moon (see page 75). [A collimated beam, with a wavelength of 600 nm, will have a half-beam divergence of about 48 feet over the distance between the earth and moon when collimated with a telescope having a 10-meter-diameter primary mirror. See, for example, Saleh, Teich, "Fundamentals of Photonics," Wiley Series in Pure and applied optics, equation 3.1-20.] These examples left me with a sometimes uneasy feeling about the book's technical accuracy, yet I cannot discount the possibility that Burke was simply explaining these phenomena in the context of the way they were understood when first discovered. The book has an excellent index. The figures, however, are of generally poor quality and hard to see. Another irritant was the frequent and often-detailed descriptions Burke gives of ingenious and complex machinery and gadgets. These descriptions are often very hard to follow, and would benefit greatly from drawings that support the textual descriptions. Aside from these few criticisms, however, I found Burke's book most enjoyable. It will broaden your horizons and make you appreciate history from a new perspective. An ideal book for just before bedtime, I highly recommend it. Duwayne Anderson
Rating: 
Summary: interesting facts but forced connections
Review: The concept of this book fascinated me. Unfortunately, the execution left much to be desired. As another reviewer pointed out, by the time you got to the end of each chapter, you forgot where it started! Many of the "connections" throughout the book are also quite forced, often relying on subjective notions of the author. Some of these were quite arbitrary. I was hoping for a much more factual basis for the links, with some insight into history from a different, non-linear perspective. Instead I felt it was much more of an exercise in conjecture. While all of the facts in the book (which I assume to be accurate to some degree) were interesting in themselves, the connections between them were quite tenuous. I read this book as I was recommended "Connections" by a friend (which I have not read), and thought "Pinball" seemed a bit more interesting. I'll be hitting the library for Connections (and give Burke another chance), as "Pinball" will never be read again by myself, and I won't take the chance on filling up valuable shelf space on Burke so easily this time.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting
Review: This is a very intriguing and interesting book, but is rather dull and boring at points. I recommend buying it if you really like the author or books of this genre, I bought it on a whim and didn't like it. I think if you like similar books, you will love this one.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting
Review: This is a very intriguing and interesting book, but is rather dull and boring at points. I recommend buying it if you really like the author or books of this genre, I bought it on a whim and didn't like it. I think if you like similar books, you will love this one.
Rating:
Summary: Very inventive style but TMI
Review: This is an ingenious ways of writing a book but it borders more on a way of storing information. It is not the type of book that you read from cover to cover although you could that if you wanted to. It is essentially cross-referenced with itself. What is does is talk about a particular advancement or invention, providing page numbers in the margins for other advancements or inventions that that one enabled. You can bounce all through the book this way - hence the name of the book. It is very interesting but there is a certain amount of information overload. I kept wondering 'How does he know all of this stuff?'.
Rating:
Summary: Very inventive style but TMI
Review: This is an ingenious ways of writing a book but it borders more on a way of storing information. It is not the type of book that you read from cover to cover although you could that if you wanted to. It is essentially cross-referenced with itself. What is does is talk about a particular advancement or invention, providing page numbers in the margins for other advancements or inventions that that one enabled. You can bounce all through the book this way - hence the name of the book. It is very interesting but there is a certain amount of information overload. I kept wondering 'How does he know all of this stuff?'.
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