Alan MacfarlaneBesprekingen

An average read that didn't manage to enlighten me on Japan in any way. Everything seemed to go in circles and only touch on the surface of many issues with constant comparisons to Britain for some reason. Alan Booth's travel books are a far better way for readers to acquaint themselves with this fascinating country.

This is an interesting and readable introduction, but nothing more. Iris, the co-author's, memoirs of growing up in an Indian tea "garden" are more interesting than the rest of the book. I think of books like this as "history lite," interesting anecdotes, major figures, not much analysis of how it fits into larger historical context.

Barely a 3 ... maybe 2.5 for "ambivalent"? There are bits and pieces of interesting story here, but it is rather dull throughout. Edit this down to what is interesting and it would take 50 pages.

Overall: Dull and not worth much time.

chiefly about the ideas of one of the most influential intellectuals of Meiji Japan

If you really think about it, without the invention of glass, civilization would be stuck in a technological rut. There would be no magnifying glass, no telescope, no spectacles, or no mirrors. We have no glass apparatus to conduct experiments nor any way to comfortably view the environment outside a building. Glass invades nearly every aspect of our lives. Even now, I am looking through a pair of corrective lenses at an image on a computer screen (two panes of glass). Alan McFarlane’s and Gerry Martin’s Glass is a historical and philosophical look at how the invention of glass shaped human history and how glass helped us view the world.

The authors break up glass inventions into five loose categories: mirrors, panes, prisms, beads, and vessels. Each of these types of glass works are traced through history and they even incorporate many, many examples of non-Western glass technologies. This is where a lot of scientific histories fail. Rather than confine the history of scientific experimentation to a linear progression from the Greeks to the Dark Ages to the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, McFarlane and Martin attempt to piece together the fragmented history from around the world. Their exploration leads to interesting questions about the nature of science, invention, and philosophy. To talk about glass, you must first discuss the science of glass, and then the science of science.

The authors’ attempt to leave no stone unturned is refreshing and that makes this “object biography” better than some others I’ve read before. The writing moves along at a steady clip and they don’t get too bogged down in any one particular area. If you’re a science history person, than this one would make a great addition to your library. The nuance given here to the history of glass and the nature of human curiosity is stunning. A quick but illuminating read.½

Iris MacFarlane wrote a touching story about her life on the tea garden in India. Then Alan MacFarlane proceeded to write the kind of history that lifts tea up to its rightful place above all other beverages. I like it better than other perspectives on history because its focus is that superiority of tea.

Of particular note was how tea was compared to wine and beer. It was explained how the alcoholic drinks could never conquer the world because they take too many resources of land and labor. They were always meant for the elites in moderation while tea could be enjoyed by the masses--the drink of everyman. This history was the most inspiring when it came time to write my own book.

Another tea history book. It was okay. I couldn't understand what the writers were getting at. Obviously many have suffered hardships as a result of the tea industry, and it has affected history and health in many ways. That's what they were saying, but it was a bit scattered in making its point.

Hieno tietoteos Japanista. Ei kuvia, mutta avaa japanilaista ajattelua.

Wonderful, easily read book that repays repeated readings. Every literate American should read it, to get a feel for how unusual our political culture really is and for its strengths and weaknesses.

Because of the very vivid and graphic style the book reads as the script for a movie or a TV-documentary. Essayistic and speculative reasoning certainly is stimulating, yet it leaves the mind longing for harder proof.
See also: History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 24 (3-4): 530-532, 2002 (publ. 2003)

An interesting and easy to read book which falls somewhere between popular history and popular science and was therefore difficult to categorise for that reason. It's a shame there isn't a history of science category as that would have solved the problem.

As it suggests it's a history of glass, focusing on the historical and cultural story of the stuff and contrasting its history in most of Eurasia with the different trajectory it took in western Europe and more particularly in north-western Europe, ie the Netherlands and England, between the mid-13th and late 17th centuries. Specifically, it traces what the authors claim is the impact of glass on the development of the Renaissance of the Mediterranean and later the "scientific revolution" which arose in NW Europe. Since this is a relatively short book (about 200pp of text plus around 50pp of notes, bibliography etc) there's a limit to how deeply the authors can delve into their subject and there's therefore a risk of simplification of the subject and perhaps NW European smugness as a result.
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On a second reading it seems to be more flawed than appeared first time round. The authors go in for an awful lot of repetition and recapping, as though the book is written for readers of (at best) mediocre intelligence. Considering that there are only a little over 200 pages of text and that the history of glass across Eurasia is a varied and complex one, I wouldn't have expected them to run out of things to say in so short a book but that is what it feels like. The treatment is also irritatingly superficial with all sorts of factors pulled into the narrative but all too often it feels as though a blunderbuss approach has been employed in an attempt to hit something - anything.

This is particularly surprising as although Martin is not a professional historian, Macfarlane is. The latter is Professor of Anthropological Science at Cambridge, a Fellow of King's College and a member of the Royal Society and has written a good number of books including the well-regarded Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England. As such, this book is really quite disappointing given the academic pedigree of one of its authors.

Edited to add that now that I've re-read Mendeleyev's Dream, another essentially popular history of science and aspects of it, the disappointing and unsatisfactory nature of The Glass Bathyscaphe becomes even more obvious. Strathern's account of the history of chemistry up to the development of the periodic table is simply much better written, a more comprehensive coverage of its subject and a more entertaining read, which of course popular histories of science should be, than Macfarlane's and Martin's history of glass.

A strange and unsatisfactory work by two authors, this feels very much like two books packaged as one.

One of these books reads the like work of a health nut, an extended panegyric on the joys of tea, primarily the supposed health benefits. The second is a long rant about the evils of growing tea in Assam and the part the British had in this.
Neither of these books is especially inspiring.

The rant against the British would have been a much more worthwhile work if it had placed the supposed evils of the British in context, comparing what they created to what had gone before, and to India outside the tea plantation.
A chapter towards the end claims to make some attempt to provide a balanced viewpoint, but does nothing to actually place the situation in context; instead it simply treats us to a "he said, she said" view of history.

The book included two or three interesting points, for example:
* Introduction of tea in the west contributed to public health because it resulted in boiled water being drunk;
* Likewise it contributed to a substantial reduction in drunkenness because it could be drunk all day without side effects;
but it really wasn't worth the hassle of wading through the dreck to get to them.½