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Summary: Like Harrison's Clocks, Perfect
Review: Magnificent. Dava Sobel is better with words than anyone I have every read. The best.
Her wrtiting is almost so good. In one passage I actually cried from reading her description of a Harrisons H-1 (page 77)In one paragraph she managed to tell the whole story of its making and its significance to the world. For reasons to numerous to mention, you MUST read this book. You will close the back cover a better person. For those who are looking for a technical explination of Harrisons work, Try Rupert Gould's book "John Harrison and his timekeepers"...
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Summary: Great book!
Review: I bought this book at the Old Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. This book is a great book for any reader, but it will especially appeal to those interested in the great sailing voyages, astronomers, and mechanical engineers. Read it BEFORE visiting the Observatory, and you'll appreciate what happened there all the more. Comes highly recommended! Bonus: Can finish on a plane ride!
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Summary: Adventure story
Review: This is an adventure tale bordering on a soap drama in reality, with bitter politics and sheer ambition thrown in sharp relief by the author. What this book is NOT is a scientific exposition of the development of the theories behind the measurement of time and the Earth. The book breezes through the concepts of time measurement and instead focuses on the people, their personalities and the stories and tales that surround these lesser known and yet brilliant people, who have impacted the world with their force of ideas and passion.
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Summary: Interesting Book
Review: This was a great read. It'd really more about clock-making than you'd think, but it's very interesting.
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Summary: Does anybody have the time?
Review: I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in history or physics or just interested in how things came to be. Dava wrote the book more from the point of general interest than from a purely scientific base. It is written in a rather simple format and does not go into great detail on the mechanics of how Harrison's clocks worked. If you are looking for a manual about his clocks do not get this book. The reason I liked the book was because it was interesting. I had not read anything about Harrison or the search for a way to find longitude before, and to tell you the truth had never thought about it before. I guess it is one of those things that we don't think about today but was a big deal back then. The book tells the process for finding an accurate way to find longitude, which was necessary to travel the seas. In a way it is funny because it shows that not much has changed in the last 300 years when it comes to government red tape. I would say go ahead and get the book unless you are looking for a very complicated book on how the clocks worked, as I have said. It is a great and easy read.
Rating: 
Summary: A Story without Science
Review: This easy to read book contains very little information about what the technical problems were that Harrison actually solved. There is not even a single diagram in the entire text. Plenty of exagerated stories of the evil board of longitude, but no technology in a book about technology. Where an attempt is made the author gets it wrong, eg. confusing angles with distances, and stating that the temparature grid of brass and iron worked because the metals were of different lengths (and of course no diagram). It is like being given a fine looking cake with fabulous icing, but when the knife goes in the cake is hollow. The book will appeal to those that like the superficial. Anthony
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Summary: A wonderful book, occasionally a little dry
Review: The book starts out a little slow and unfocused, took a little while to really draw me in. Eventually, however, I was totally engrossed in the story. The writer either loosened up and improved as she went, or I warmed up to it as the story hooked me more. It was a wonderful little book, and I'm very happy to have read it, though I can't help thinking about what it could have been. It reads a bit dry sometimes, too often like a manual, sometimes too technical, and skitting about too quickly. I never was able to picture the devices from her technical, yet skimpy descriptions. I waited until the end to look at the pictures, and they were revelations. The biggest drawback, though is the weakness in the narrative. Although the story is incredibly engrossing, it feels a bit underdeveloped. She flits about so quickly, rarely developing a true scene to its full potential. It's an incredibly quick read--a tiny little book that I consumed within 24 hours as a slow reader. That was nice in a way, but it could have been much more. You won't be sorry you invested the time, just wishing you could linger over it with a whole lot more.
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Summary: Interesting History, not enough story
Review: Dava Sobel originally wrote about the inventor John Harrison in a magazine article for the Harvard Magazine. A publisher read that article and asked her to develop the idea into a book. That it became a book, and later into a 4 hour television series, is testament to how fascinating a topic this is. I enjoyed this book a lot, I like history and the people that have been gifted enough to change it. The reason that I didn't give this book 5 stars is because it doesn't read with the smoothness of a novel and it doesn't have enough of a "story teller" quality. I found I had the same problem in reading Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror", the information is great and fascinating and powerful, but I want a story, or else I feel like I am in school again and history becomes too chore like. The story in "Longitude" is there, it is just missing some quality, one I can't quite identify, but that I sense is missing. That being said, if you are a reader that enjoys history and the people behind important inventions and discoveries, this book will appeal to you. It has some of the same problems I felt the book "Flu" (written by a journalist) has. Being written by someone at the outset as something other than a book, it lacks something that a strong novel has, and even though this is a true account, history can be told in a novel like way, as in "The Perfect Storm". I do recommend this book to anyone interested in invention, maritime history and similar. It is a very fascinating topic.
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Summary: Innovation and the battle of perfectionism
Review: The recommendations that I had received to read this book were right on. Based on the events that occurred to solve THE navigational problem of plotting longitude, Dava Sobel, writes a very clear and easy to read tale of events. I will admit that at first, I put off reading this book for a year because I could not find the subject very thrilling. Now that I read this book, I wished I had read it earlier as the events in the key inventor's life, John Harrison, tell a tremendous story for all innovators and inventors. Mr. Harrison, an unknown clock maker, solved one of the most critical problems of it's day, by looking to unconventional means to solve the problem. From Galileo to Newton, some pretty illustrious names can be found leading the charge to discover an accurate means of plotting longitude. The problem was so vital and strategic to naval superiority and dominance in commerce, that the British government funded a worldwide challenge for anyone that could discover how to determine longitude and prove that it accurately worked on a consistent basis. While many of the world's leading scientists and astronomers were convinced that the only way to calculate longitude was from the movements of the stars and moons, Mr. Harrison created an extremely accurate timepiece and proved that his invention worked. Yet politics, greed and his own perfectist traits kept him from being recognized and awarded the grand prize... I will highly recommend this book to my sons to read and to all my business associates that are so focused on bringing innovation to the market place, but spend too much time trying to perfect their ideas.
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Summary: A Scientific Tale That Reads Like A Novel
Review: "Longitude" is unique in that it tells a tale that intrigues, entertains, informs, shocks and amuses, all at once. Sobel's description of the longitude problem and proposed solutions are both capably written and easily understandable. But the real excitement in Sobel's account isin the characters portrayed. Given its subject matter, one might expect "Longitude" to be nothing more than a recitation of scientific principles, theories, and proofs. Instead, Sobel tells the intriguing story of a brilliant man who suffered constant insults and inequities, but perservered. The villians in this story are almost too conniving and evil to be real; the heroes almost too pure and naive to be true. Nevertheless, Sobel presents these individuals with omnipresent detachment, allowing their actions to speak for themselves. The result is an extremely enjoyable (but alas too short!) account of a fascinating scientific problem and engrossing personal interplay.
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