Time's Pendulum: From Sundials to Atomic Clocks, the Fascinating History of Timekeeping and How Our Discoveries Changed the World

I purchased this book as a gift for a friend who absolutely loved it. He's a big fan of anything to do with time, from clocks to wrist watches. He said it was a very informative and enjoyable read.

Written by a buy who knows a lot about the history of clocks, but he spends too much of the book stretching out the content by going into obscure side topics.

I agree with the Gibson review below ("Two books in one, both interesting!") and can little to it.I wish the author would come out with a update version with pictures and more diagrams.

I've already had some interest in the topic, but wanted to pickup another book and see what else I could learn, so got this one based on the reviews. A very good book, would highly recommend for someone who wants to learn about the history of keeping time.

Great read and informative on the differnt methods of time keeping and measuring and the reasons for their developement.

I gave this book as a gift.

The author is extremely thorough at putting the few facts she covers into their proper humanitarian context. You walk away with a warm feeling of having just absorbed a complex of grand ideas. Very uplifting. For some.If you are an engineer or a scientist, looking for a plethora of facts, or designs, this book is not for you. You will rage about having spent your time yet learned very little.

The subject matter IS fascinating; the writing style is acceptable; but the illustrations leave something to be desired; they are often too small to be of any value and or poor reproduction. If I had been able to thumb through this book in person, I would not have bought it. As it is, I read it and then donated it to the library sale. In other words ... worth reading but not worth keeping.

General understanding.

This book was okay, but its subject was not exactly what I was expecting. The first half of the book discusses sundials, hourglasses, and water clocks, and then explains the slow development of our current clocks. It provides interesting information about the difficulty surrounding latitude and longitude and local versus global time, and touches on how clocks helped with mapping the world. It talked about the role of the church in time's history and it also discussed how some small changes could give our planet a very different day/night cycle.I was expecting these topics; however, the second half of the book went into radioactive/geographical timing and how scientists believe certain techniques allow them to determine the age of the earth to be billions of years old. The writer is very clearly a secular evolutionist and often mocks Christian/creationist beliefs. I found this very distracting and it made the book unenjoyable for me. I also was not expecting the topic of the earth's creation/evolution to come up and would have much preferred more detailed information about the earlier topics, for it seemed that the author was purposefully keeping her information simple. If someone picks up this book, they probably are interested enough in the topic to want more detailed information, so her simplicity was also disappointing.