Reviews

Published Reviews of
Ken Alder's
THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS

  From North America:

"Alder delivers a triple whammy with this elegant history of technology, acute cultural chronicle and riveting intellectual adventure…. [He] convincingly argues that science and self-knowledge are matters of inference, and by extension prone to error."

--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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"Truly excellent.... [A] wonderful and endlessly fascinating book."

-- Simon Winchester, The [Toronto] Globe and Mail

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"General audiences ... will be fascinated by the surprisingly colorful history of the seemingly mundane metric system."

--Booklist

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"A fascinating account of how the meter became the meter…. Written in the vein of Dava Sobel's Longitude and reading like a historical thriller."

--Library Journal

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"Ken Alder has written nearly 400 pages on the history of the metric system. Believe it or not, these are enthralling, fascinating, even - yes - mind-altering pages.... Alder is as meticulous a historian as Delambre and Mechain were astronomers. His book is dense and careful, but he maintains the story of his two protagonists, and the true hero of the book, the meter. And that is the best part of his book: Alder never forgets that he's telling a story, and he imbues the narrative with a tremulous, fever-soaked climax and a lengthy and satisfying denouement."

--Anthony Doerr, in The Boston Globe, Sunday Book Review

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"[A] highly original new book.... [A] journey worth taking..., graced by a vividly descriptive sense of place. [It] bathes the past in the light, life and humanity of the eternal present."

-- Timothy Ferris, New York Times Book Review, cover review

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"With the drama of a novel..., The Measure of All Things is far more than history-of-science examination of geography and astonomy."

--Rich Gottshall, The Indianapolis Star

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In vivid prose, in a narrative brimming with humanity..., Ken Alder brings to life [this] fascinating story.... Told by a master story-teller and lover of history, this is a tale to savored slowly.... This is one of those rare works that both rewrite history and capture the imagination."

--R. Foster Winans, The Philadelphia Inquirer

   From the U.K. and Ireland:

Cited by the The Sunday Times (London) as a book "You really must read."

"Ken Alder has transformed [this history] into one of the most gripping stories that the history of science has to tell..... His account of this extraordinary episode has all the pace and plot of a historical adventure novel, as though Longitude had been crossed with A Tale of Two Cities, with a measure of Don Quixote thrown in. Yet this book is also a meditation on the limits of empiricism as well as on the particular perils of collaborative research.

--Richard Hamblyn, in The Sunday Times (London).

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"This riveting account of the origins of the metric system by Ken Alder, an American academic, is an eye-opener."

--Christopher Booker, in The Daily Telegraph.

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"One of the many virtues of Ken Alder's book is that he makes its science comprehensible to determined non-specialist clods like me. It's also fluent in style, rich in both ideas and characters and full of dramatic urgency."

--John Preston, in The Sunday Telegraph.

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"[A]s a mind-boggling adventure story from the history of science, and as a fascinating strand from the history of the French Revolution, it is unlikely to be bettered for many years to come."

--Harry Browne, The Sunday Business Post (Dublin).

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"[E]legant, edifying and often witty..., The Measure of All Things is one of the finest narrative histories I have ever read. It is beautifully written throughout, endlessly informative and meticulously documented.... The result of this diligence, and Alder's brilliance as a writer, is a book which thrills at every level. It is at once a historical detective story, a marvellous demonstration of how science and its social context animate one another, a human drama of the hightest order and a parable which proves that--as Protagoras put it 25 centuries ago--'man is the measure of all things.'

-- Robert Macfarlane, The Observer (London)

Pre-publication praise for
Ken Alder's
THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS

"A moving study of character, an intriguing detective tale, an enlightening account of scientific progress, an insightful rumination on fact and error-by any measure, a wonderful book."

--H. W. Brands, author of The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin and The Age of Gold

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"The Measure of All Things is a colorful and beautifully written story, filled with history, powerful ambitions, and human frailties."

--Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams

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"Ken Alder's book on the history of the meter displays the precision of a geometer and the wit of a savant. Alder shows himself to be that rarest of things: a scholar whose moral compass is as exactingly calibrated as his intellect (which is very fine indeed). How does this book on measurement measure up to others in the field? The answer is simple: It rules."

--Allen Kurzweil, author of The Grand Complication and A Case of Curiosities

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"The Measure of All Things is a brilliant study in the intellectual origins of modernity, based on prodigious research and skillfully written. It will interest and delight anyone concerned with the shaping of modern science and engineering, and will be recognized as a masterpiece in its genre."

--Norman Cantor, author of In the Wake of the Plague

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"Who would have thought precision could be so messy, standardization so divisive, mistakes so productive--or the history of science so marvelously entertaining?"

--Edward Tenner, author of Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences