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Amazon.co.uk Review
The passage of day followed by night is so definite that few of us bother to think about calendars and just take them for granted. And yet, as E.G. Richards shows in his fascinating account of how time was mapped, calendars are not at all straightforward. Calendars are essentially human constructs, as Richards quotes "God made the days and nights but man made the Calendar". A calendar is an attempt to make sense of the chance events during the creation of the solar system which determined the variations in the Earth's rotation and orbit around the Sun. Many different calendar systems have been invented by various cultures and societies around the world over the last few thousand years. Some have laboriously constructed huge stone calculating machines like Stonehenge in England; others make do with much simpler devices. My own favourite is a string calendar from Sumatra--a square plate with 30 holes and a piece of string to thread through a hole a day. But how do the Sumatrans know when a year is up?
Without calendars modern life would be chaotic and highly dangerous. As Richards points out: "international trade would be almost impossible" without some uniformity. The extraordinary thing is that despite the proliferation of different calendars, there has been international agreement over the use of just one, which happens to be the Gregorian calendar.
E.G. Richards is a an English academic biophysicist, whose interest in calendars was sparked off by writing a computer program to convert dates from one calendar to another. Fortunately, after many years of research he has compiled this fascinating book for the general reader. The three parts of the book cover the theory behind calendars, their original variety from different societies over the ages, and finally the tricky business of converting from one calendar to another. There is something here for everyone although you will need to be fairly dedicated to negotiate some of the more mathematical parts. Various appendices provide astronomical constants etc., and there is a most useful glossary, further reading list, and index.
With the millennium in the offing, Richards reminds us that we will be celebrating the wrong date--January AD 2000 "is only 1999 years from the start of the Christian era, which began on 1 January of the year AD1, there being no year 0". --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
"The author's style is both precise and appealing.... Intriguing and compelling...offers...much to ponder about the relationship of calendars and culture."--Frederick Pratter, Christian Science Monitor
"Richard's compendious history of the calendar reflects the huge range of the subject, touching as it does on topics as diverse as the origin of writing, the French Revolution, Hindu astronomy and various proposals for a thirteen-month year...perhaps the most complete and lively treatise on temporal lore published this millennium."--The Sciences
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Some have likened the calendar to a clock; this is, of course, a mistake. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Some have likened the calendar to a clock; this is, of course, a mistake. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Amazon.com:
3.9 out of 5 stars (7 customer reviews)
29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Past Perfect, 18 Sep 2001
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History (Paperback)
One of several books written in anticipation of the millennium, "Mapping Time: The Calendar and Its History" by E. G. Richards suffers from an especially heavy burden of typographical errors. As can be seen on the author's own web page, the address of which also is incorrect, there are hundreds of errors, some of which affect the accuracy of the account. For example, on page 208, January 1 came to mark the beginning of the Roman civil year in 153 BC, not 158 BC, and was in response to the Second Celtiberian War in Spain. Rather than wait until the middle of March for consuls to assume office, the new year was moved to the first of January so the Roman commander could depart with his legions that much sooner. It is a pity that so many errors compromise an otherwise informative history. Until they can be corrected, a better introduction to the calendar is "The Oxford Companion to the Year."
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting but flawed, 18 May 2000
By David Adaskin - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History (Paperback)
Very interesting history of the major calendar systems used around the world, both in the present day and in the past. It also gets into the mathematics of how to convert between calendar systems, including algorithms suitable for computer programming. Unfortunately, there are numerous typographical errors in the narrative and in the algorithms! The word "temperature" where the author clearly meant "temperate", substitution of "*" for "-" in a formula, etc. So far, I have been able to correct the formula for computing the day of the week and the formula for computing the date of Easter. I'm not looking forward to tackling the other algorithms. Did anyone proofread this before it was printed? Maybe the publisher could put up an errata sheet on their web site.Good for the history, but be prepared to do some algebra if you want to use the algorithms.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Erudite But Fun, 18 July 2003
By John D. Cofield - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History (Paperback)
This is a nice examination of the different calendars and methods of mapping time that humans have employed over the centuries. On the surface it has the air of a dusty reference book, but inside the author is often witty and amusing as he covers the histories and backgrounds of different dating systems. I'm especially impressed by his inclusion of the different algorithms used to calculate dates, of Easter for example, which are marvelously complex. Most readers will never have occasion to use these algorithms, but its nice to know they're there. I also appreciated the charts and the glossary of the more obscure calendrical terms.
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