The map that changed the world William Smith and the birth of modern geology

Review by Booklist Review

In the much admired and widely read Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (1998), Winchester told the true and fascinating story of a man who played a key role in the creation of the OED. Now he brings his writerly talents to bear on the tale of another relatively unknown individual who also made a considerable contribution to intellectual history. In the early years of the nineteenth century, William Smith created the first geological map of Great Britain, a time-consuming, solitary project that helped establish geology as one of the "fundamental fields of study." Smith was born of humble origins, the son of a village blacksmith in Oxfordshire, England. While working as a surveyor, Smith was struck by an epiphany as he pondered the striations of rock in a coal mine. The order and regularity of those striations led him to formulate some of geology's key principles. Winchester tells Smith's story, including the dramatic ups and downs of his personal life, in vivid detail. Like the work of Dava Sobel (Longitude, 1995) and Mark Kurlansky (Cod, 1997), this is just the kind of creative nonfiction that elevates a seemingly arcane topic into popular fare. A natural for public libraries. --Brad Hooper

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

As he did in The Professor and the Madman, Winchester chooses an obscure historical character who is inherently fascinating, but whose life and work have also had a strong impact on civilization. Here is William Smith, the orphan son of a village blacksmith, with lots of pluck and little luck until the end of his life when this pioneering first geological cartographer of the world beneath our feet was finally and fully recognized. Smith's life illustrates the interconnectedness of early 19th-century science, the industrial revolution, an intellectual climate that permits a look beyond religious dogma, and the class biases that endlessly impede his finances and fortunes. Published in 1815, Smith's huge and beautiful map of geological strata and the fossils imbedded in them blazed the way for Darwin and the creation-vs.-evolution debates that rage even day. Winchester is a fine stylist who also has a fine, clear reading voice. He fully engages listeners, not only with the excitement of Smith's life and work, but even with geological explications that would have been pretty dull in science class. Simultaneous release with HarperCollins hardcover (Forecasts, June 4). (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Former Oxford geologist Winchester follows up the success of The Professor and the Madman with this story of canal digger William Smith, who first noticed that rocks come in layers with different fossils in each and then proceeded to map all of England geologically. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by School Library Journal Review

Adult/High School-In The Professor and the Madman (HarperCollins, 1998), Winchester managed to turn the seemingly dull story of the genesis of a dictionary into an international bestseller. His new book is about the equally unglamorous subject of geology, but he explores far more than the scientific classification of rocks. Once again readers are treated to the captivating life story of an obscure, eccentric man who made, against all odds, a big difference. William Smith led the life of a Charles Dickens character, complete with debtor's prison, sinister aristocratic snobs, intellectual "pilferers," a mentally ill wife, and an understudy nephew (even more destitute than himself) who eventually became professor of geology at Oxford. Smith was a self-educated canal digger with a keen eye, limitless perseverance, and an insatiable curiosity about all things under the topsoil. He had ideas about stratification that no one had before, and he turned those ideas into a masterwork: the world's first true geologic map. His work had huge implications in numerous aspects of early 19th-century life, including religion, commerce, agriculture, politics, and science. Winchester's book has a few flaws: repetition, overstatement of his primary themes, several proofreading lapses (especially near the end). But for the most part, it is an engaging, lively story that will capture the interest of many teens, and not only those who maintain rock or fossil collections.-Robert Saunderson, Berkeley Public Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A masterful, felicitous tribute to Smith (1769-1839), the extraordinary ordinary Englishman who conceived, researched, and drew the world's first geological map. Winchester (The Professor and the Madman, 1998, etc.), who studied geology at Oxford, begins at one of the lowest points of Smith's life: August 21, 1819, the day he emerged from King's Bench Debtors' Prison, his life in disarray. It would be a dozen years before he returned to London to receive the honors he had earned for his most lonely and arduous task-constructing a geological map of England and Wales. As Winchester shows, Smith (an autodidact son of a blacksmith) was the most improbable of candidates to become a scientific giant. But he was equipped with a ferocious determination, an insatiable curiosity, an eagerness to muddy his boots and roughen his hands, and-of great importance-a rugged physical constitution that never failed him. He was born into an England whose churches taught (and whose parishioners believed) the Biblical account of a divine, six-day creation. He was also born into a strict class system that inhibited the acceptance of his work (for years he was denied membership in the Geological Society by the perfumed snobs who ran it-and who plagiarized his research). But he lived in a time that hungered for the skills he had mastered: drainage of farmland, construction of canals, and location of minerals. (He even discovered that the famous thermal springs of Bath had cooled because they were blocked by the bone of an ox.) One of his great insights was that fossils were the key to understanding geology: certain fossils exist only in certain strata. He amassed an enormous fossil collection that penury forced him to sell to the British Museum for a mere #500. He spent years traveling the English countryside, mapping the strata he had learned to identify in the coalmines and canals that had dirtied his clothes and enriched his imagination. A fluid, fascinating, emotional story of an unlikely genius who created a science. (60 illustrations) First printing of 150,000; author tour

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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The Map That Changed the World William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology Chapter One Escape on the Northbound Stage The last day of August 1819, a Tuesday, dawned gray, showery, and refreshingly cool in London, promising a welcome end to a weeklong spell of close and muggy weather that seemed to have put all the capital's citizens in a nettlesome, liverish mood. Anyone trying to hurry along the cobbled and granite-paved streets that day was still certain to be frustrated, despite the improvement in the weather: The crowds! The crush! The dirt! The smell! More than a million people had lately been counted as living within and beyond London's city walls, and each day hundreds more, the morning papers reported, were to be found streaming in from the countryside, bent on joining the new prosperity that all hoped might soon be flowering now that the European wars were over. The city's population was well on the way to doubling itself in less than twenty years. The streets were in consequence filled with a jostling, pullulating, dawdling mass of people. And animals, too: It seemed of little matter to some farmers that there had long been laws to keep them from driving cattle through the center of town'so among the throngs one could spot mangy-looking sheep, more than a few head of cattle, the odd black pig, and of course horses, countless horses, pulling carriages and goods vehicles alike. The stench of their leavings, on a hot week such as this had been, was barely tolerable. Since it was very early in the morning, there were, of course, fewer crowds than usual. Fewer, that is, except in one or two more notorious spots, where a sad and shabby ritual of the dawn tended to bring out the throngs'and where this story is most appropriately introduced. The better known of the London sites where the morning masses gathered was in the rabbit warren of lanes that lay near Saint Paul's Cathedral, to the east of where the river Fleet had once run. Halfway along the Fleet Market a passerby would have noted, perhaps with the wry amusement of the metropolitan sophisticate, that crowds had gathered outside a rather noble, high-walled building whose address, according to a written inscription above the tall gateway, was simple: Number Nine. An onlooker would have been amused because the address was a mere euphemism, the building's real purpose only too well known. The streets to the west of Saint Paul's were one of the two districts of nineteenth-century London where a clutch of the capital's many prisons were concentrated: the Newgate, the Bridewell, the Cold Bath Fields, and the Ludgate jails had all been built nearby, in what in winter were the chill gloom and coal-smoke fogs of the river valley. And Number Nine was the site of the best known of them all, the prince of prisons, the Fleet. There was another, precisely similar, ghetto of prisons on the south side of the Thames, in the area that, then technically beyond London, was the borough of Southwark: another small huddle of grim, high-walled mansion houses of punishment and restraint'the Clink, the Marshalsea, the Bedlam prison-hospital, and, formidable in appearance and reputation, just like its sister establishment back at Number Nine, the infamous barrackslike monstrosity of the Prison of the King's Bench. The King's Bench, the nearby Marshalsea, and the Fleet were different from most London prisons. They were very old, for a start, and were privately run according to a set of very strange rituals. They had been instituted for a sole purpose'the holding, for as long as necessary, of men and women who could not or would not pay their bills. These three institutions were debtors' prisons'and the reason that crowds formed around their entrances each sunrise is that, every morning just after dawn, it was the policy of their wardens to free those inmates who had discharged their obligations. Of the three the Fleet had the most intriguing entranceway. On either side of the gate was a caged window, and above it the motto "Remember the Poor Debtors, Having No Allowance." Through the grate could be seen a small and gloomy chamber, with nothing inside except a wooden bench. A doorway beyond, locked and barred from the outside, gave access to the main cellblock. Each day a new impoverished prisoner would be pushed out into the cage'to spend the next twenty-four hours on begging duty, pleading with passersby for money to help in his or her plight. Debtors were obliged to pay for their time in prison; those who turned out to be totally out of funds were forced to go into the grated room and beg. The crowds outside the Fleet and the King's Bench prisons on that cool August Tuesday morning, and that so interrupted the progress of men of affairs on their ways along the granite setts with which the road in Southwark and Saint Paul's had recently been paved, were there to see a spectacle. Tourists came to the jails to see the beggars; the merely curious'as well as the small press of family and friends (and perhaps some still-unsatisfied creditors)'came to greet with amiable good cheer the small group of inmates who each day would emerge, blinking, into the morning sunlight. According to the prison records, one of the half dozen prisoners who stepped free from behind the high walls of the King's Bench Prison on that Tuesday morning was a sturdy-looking yeoman whose papers showed him to have come from Oxfordshire, sixty miles west of London. Those few portraits painted of him in his later years, together with a single silhouette fashioned when he was in his dotage, and a bust sculpted in marble more than twenty years later, show him to be somewhat thickset, balding, with a weatherbeaten face. Some less charitable souls might call him a rather plain-looking man... The Map That Changed the World William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology . Copyright © by Simon Winchester. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology by Simon Winchester All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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