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Summary: Alternative for those needing details
Review: 'Calendar' lives up to its other reviews. Not a real history and not a real book on computing calendars. An alternative book, readily available at Amazon, may be what some users really wanted.While not a history of calendars, 'Calendrical Calculations: The Millennium Edition' by Edward M. Reingold, Nachum Dershowitz (Paperback) provides brief historys of a dozen or more calendars, and complete information on the mathematical basis of the calendar, and how to do calendric calculations. It's not for the casual or non-mathematical reader, but provides a wealth of information for those who are not afraid of strange symbols. (I have no connection with the publisher, authors, royalties or any such; I'm just one of thousands of delighted readers.)
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Summary: Fascinating history!
Review: Although ostensibly about a very narrow subject, David Ewing Duncan's Calendar: Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year tells a much broader story. This fine book combines both intellectual and social history with science, with the ultimate issue being "how do we define and measure a year." This is not a simple question scientifically, and the input of religion makes it more difficult still. For example, the most holy of days for Christians is Easter, yet the formula used to determine Easter was based, in part, on the spring equinox. The calendar in use before Pope Gregory was not quite accurate, with the result that Easter in the sixteenth century was being celebrated, according to astronomers, ten days "off." Science and religion have never been particularly comfortable bedfellows (one only needs to recall Galileo), so any "reform" was not as simple as it might seem. Duncan tells an excellent story, and what he does best is place in full context the seemingly narrow question of how we set the year. Although seemingly about a narrow subject, this is a wide-ranging and insightful work of history, ably written.
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Summary: Enjoyable book on a fascinating subject
Review: I agree with all of the criticisms by previous reviewers -- there are some easily caught errors (which speaks to poor editing as much as anything) and some goofy narrative speculation (not only the reindeer-clad moon-watching Cro-Magnon but also the weary Roman foot soldier). I started the book several times and, confronting these weaknesses, put it down again. But I always wound up going back because the subject is so interesting, and did eventually finish the book. Having acknowledged the faults, though, I must say that I learned a lot reading this book, which is filled with interesting anecdotes as well as respectful nods to the many people who contributed to the development of our present-day calendar. The author does a good job of balancing specific information with the big picture, and one learns quite a bit about the history of Europe and the Catholic Church (and other areas and institutions to a lesser extent). There is a good index.
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Summary: An Error-ridden History
Review: I ordered this book expecting it to be an entertaining history of the development of the calendar, but this history tends to be very sterile in its presentation. Personalities are buried under dry facts. My biggest objection is how many errors occur. Not just the numerous typographical errors, but ridiculous ones where the author states the reverse of what he obviously means. Even his step by step procedure for calculating the date for Easter doesn't work because of errors. One has to wonder if anyone read the galley proofs.
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Summary: I liked it
Review: I read this not long after it was first published, so I can only speak to my general recollections. If you're looking for a Michael Crichton or Stephen King page-turner, then click on... And, after reading some of the negative reviews here, I also remember that some of the computations in this book don't quite check out. I also remember that some "tangents" to the basic story seemed to be unduly drawn out, in an apparent effort to make a book of "respectable length" (about 250 pages, in my hardbound edition). On the other hand, I think most academically inclined people would enjoy this book. In a world where time can be measured to an accuracy of "one second in 1,400,000 years" (tycho.usno.navy.mil/cesium.html), and the rotation of the earth is no longer used as the basis for its measurement (it's not sufficiently constant), and anyone with an Internet connection can easily synchronize his PC to within .2 seconds of the correct time, it is very easy to take this whole subject very much for granted. However, if asked how long it takes the earth to make one orbit of the sun, most people would answer "one year"... and they would be wrong; it takes about 1 year and 20 minutes for the earth to orbit the sun. There are answers to many questions (that most people probably never ask themselves) in this book. If "decem" is Latin for "ten" (thus the words decimal, decade, etc.), then why is December the 12th month of the year? There are also surprises for even the generally well educated: the Gregorian calendar "of 1582" wasn't accepted in England and America until 1752.
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Summary: What Time Is It?
Review: It's a fascinating topic--how do you create a unit of measurement for that most elusive of all illusions: time? But it's not all that fascinating of a book. I'm not a big fan of non-fiction books loaded down with hypothetical meanderings--the purely fictional fairy tale of a "cro-magnon Francis Bacon" is simply embarassing to read--and even the recitation of facts is questionably at times. A fine concept, but there's a lot left to be desired on the follow through.
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Summary: Fascinating and very readable
Review: Many books on the topic of time, calendars, and, in an unsuprisingly related way, papal history have so much to tell given the vast scope of years involved that their authors either just scratch the surface, leaving the reader wanting more, or tell lengthy, complicated anecdotes about select occurences, leaving the reader scratching his head and wondering how the events are related. Duncan does an admirable job of telling the history like, of all things, a STORY. The myriad names and places somehow settle into a pattern that makes the disparate chapters makes sense together.
Certain editorial license is take by Duncan, as well, which adds to the reader's enthusiasm in speeding through the chapters. It's a quick read and a great re-read.
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Summary: Of dates, times, people and places...
Review: There are a number of things I wish someone told me before I picked up this book, and here are some of them. This is NOT a book about the mathematics or the science behind the creation of the Calendar and the process of measuring time. Rather it is a long winded and one sided rambling history of the creation of the Gregorian Calendar in its present form. The book is too heavily European centric and Christian centric. It relegates all other histories of the measurement of time, such as the Mayans, the Indians, the Chinese, the Arabic etc to at most a chapter each. Further, the entire book is about the impact of the Church on the creation of the Calendar due to the need to fix Easter, and gives amiss to factors such as sea navigation, intercultural trade links etc, which were just as critical in the search for a universal time. Instead these are treated as anecdotes to illustrate the problems of a non-universal time, more as effects of changes made by the Church, rather than socio-cultural causes that led to the need for a Calendar. In addition to all the above, the writing style makes the book a true chore to read. Filled with names, dates, names of towns and references to texts, paragraphs become extremely overloaded with junk information for anyone except the scholar interested in making chronological research notes. The other aspect that makes plain reading difficult is the frequently occurring capitals and years within paranthesis. A sample paragraph, picked almost at random is below. "The bull itself was written in the fall of 1581, mostly by Pedro Chacon. On 20th October 1581 , he sent a draft from Turino to Cardinal Sirleto in Rome. Chacon then died a few days later, leaving the final version of the bull to be written by member Vincenzo di Lauri. Sirleto also dispatched Antionio Lilius, Aloysius's brother, to work with the pope's aides on the final bull at Mondragone, Gregory's favorite villa outside of Rome " The good part of the book is that for someone unexposed to the frailties of time-measurement, this is definitely an eye opener in showing how recent the phenomenon of a universal time is. But even in the book being a non-scientific exposition, it falls far short of its own blurb which proudly announces the decision by Mao Zedong to accept the Gregorian Calendar as a seminal event, one which is treated in its entirety in a couple of paragraphs as compared to the entire book about the habits of monks and the "Ecclesiastical history of the English".Worth a read, not a buy though.
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Summary: It has a pretty cover...
Review: There is much to recommend this book, in the course of telling the history of the creation of the modern day calendar, Mr. Duncan, really tells a history of humanity as a whole, his understanding of the workings of the universe, mathematics, nature and time itself. It also a story of bureaucracy smashing head on into science. If you get this book, the first 5 or 6 pages are full of positive reviews, however on closer inspection of the reviews, most are vague at best in reference to his work, or only mention events occuring in the first 200 pages. If I had read only the first two hundred pages, I too would have raved, but the history gets bogged down into a morass, as if Mr. Duncan was not about to throw out man hours of research and save the reader a dull last hundred pages or so. At once this book is vague and yet detailed, Duncan will launch into mathematica (known as computus in the book) and then only half explain it, leaving the reader a confused jumble of facts, most of the time not relevant to the final creation of the calendar. I picked up this book thinking it would be an easy week or two read, but it stretched into a monthlong assault on a small word, big spaced, few sentences per page book, which started out in essaic prose and finally became textbook dry by the end. Ultimately, I am forced to give this book a bad review because I could not enjoy reading it.
And lastly but not leastly, in something, to me, which seems very strange at the least, the cover is an illuminated manuscript over which Mr. Duncan's title has been inserted and yet for some reason, it is as if the manufacturer only pasted his title over the original manuscript which can still be seen through the brown plate in middle, leaving me at least, more curious about the original wording instead of the overly long title of Mr. Duncan's over it.
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Summary: Sheding light on a mystery
Review: This book is a must read for anyone who enjoys quarky history books. Not only is it an excellent source for learning all about the calendar, but it follows the maintenence of the calendar all through the dark ages and it sheds a lot of light on the dark ages. The reasons for why are calendar is what it is today is facinating history and Duncan presents it in a way that captures the reader.
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