Book Reviews

This book has been featured a lot in the newspapers recently. I wanted to read it because I remember reading about Joseph Needham many years ago, probably when I was in secondary school. It was an article about his work on _Science and Civilisation in China_. I remember my mum saying to me that I ought to do research like that, because I was interested in science but usually did better at history and English in school.

Anyway, this book is completely checked out of all the libraries in Singapore. Luckily I found a copy, likely because it's the British title - "Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China".

Joseph Needham was a fascinating, larger-than-life character. Not only was he really talented at his initially chosen field of biochemistry (specifically embryology), he was linguistically gifted (9+ languages, fluent in many, learned Chinese in a couple of years - although he had a lot of incentive) and in the end made his major contribution to two fields he had no training in: history of science, and Chinese studies. Quite the Renaissance Man, though it seems less rare for his era than it is now. And though he was a "genius", he worked very hard, almost to exhaustion. Even in lull periods when he had nothing to read and no one to meet, he would be working on things - translating Chinese folk songs, for example.

And he was quite a personality too, going to China in WWII, making his way around the country, meeting fascinating people at every turn. The book really is quite entertaining.

One question I had was, how did he put together all the material for this gigantic book (umpteen volumes in print) without the benefit of computers? Well he had an excellent filing system it seems and was an inveterate notetaker: the archives at Cambridge have old receipts with notes scribbled on the back of it. As I was reading the book, though, my thought was: _Science and Civilisation_ shouldn't be a book. It should be a _wiki_. It really should. He started off with lists of inventions that the Chinese came up with before the West, having trawled through ancient encyclopedias and other works - that's the sort of thing that's perfect for a wiki. Of course, _S&C_ is more than just lists - there's essays, and things, but they could go in too. Rather than being books that sit in the reference section of the library and never get taken out (as they are here). (read less)