history

This is a so-so account of man's attempt to map time. On the plus side, Calendar gives you a good and broad account of the main developments throughout the last 2500 years. It's a bit cheesy in places and really only deals with events surronding the development of the Julian and Gregorian calendars. But it's not bad as a first attempt at the story. 'Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar' by astronomer Duncan Steel is much better though.

On the negative side, it's far too long and lacks credibility when dealing with numbers, astronomy and almost anything technical. Imagine a book written by an author who can't work out that if Jesus of Nazarath was born in 4BC, and there is no year zero dividing the BC and AD eras, then the year 2000 is actually 2004 and the new millenium began on 1st January 1997. If he's claiming that 1997 was really 2000, then he's also wrong. That honour went to 1996.

Just run an excel spreadsheet. Begin column 1 with -4 and then column 2 with 1 (omitting the zero between-1 and +1 in column 1). Run them side-by-side up to 2004. You'll get the answer in a flash. Why couldn't DED or his editor(s) have done this? It's very easy. In any case, there is still considerable doubt about the actual date of Christ's birth - with estimates ranging from 7BC to 3BC.

Also, its explanation of the Easter Computus just doesn't work. Nor does it explain why the calculation doesn't use the actual full moon, but uses ecclesiastical time instead - since this means that Passover and Easter (almost) never coincide. It's account of the failings of the Atomic Clock are sheer nonsense. And there is nothing to show the reader why the Gregorian calendar was designed to reflect the time between successive vernal equinoxes.

There are some bits I did like about Calendar. There easy bits on the development of the Julian calendar, placement mathematics in Arabia and India and then the decimal system involving the first use of the concept of zero. These chapters are quite good since it was mathematical developments that proved pivotal in increasing the accuracy of calendars.

This was also the first time I read about the confusion that reigned after the Gregorian calendar was adopted in the mid-16th century. Only Catholic countries obeyed the Pope's orders. Protestant states eventually joined in (mostly for economic reasons), but at different times over the next 250 years. The result was total confusion in Europe and it's colonial territories. I also now understand why the United Kingdom's tax year begins on seemingly bizarre date of 6th April - a throw back to the Julian calendar, the old New Year and the usual religious jiggery-pokery.

Overall, not bad. ...

Some years back I studied the calendar, especially with eye to the Hebrew one, which I found quite fascinating. I still found a lot of new information in this book that I did not know about. The book is interesting and well written, and I can very well recomment it to anyone who is interested in history in general, and the calendar in particular.

There is one glaring mistake at the front of the book, though, and one may wonder if it is ment as a test to the reader. It is the list of what year 2000 AD will be. The first item says "1997 according to Christ's actual birth circa 4 BC". A simple calculation will show that the item should have said "2004 according to Christ's actual birth circa 4 BC".

I suspect that whoever created the list (David Ewing Duncan himself?) has confused year 2000 AD with the beginning of the next millenium if reckoned from Christ's birth, as we would have had year 2001 (the first year of the next millennium) in 1997 AD if our calendar had had Christ's actual birth as the starting point. As it is, our calendar begins 4 years too late.

There are a number of things I wish someone told me before I picked up this book, and here are some of them. This is NOT a book about the mathematics or the science behind the creation of the Calendar and the process of measuring time. Rather it is a long winded and one sided rambling history of the creation of the Gregorian Calendar in its present form. The book is too heavily European centric and Christian centric. It relegates all other histories of the measurement of time, such as the Mayans, the Indians, the Chinese, the Arabic etc to at most a chapter each. Further, the entire book is about the impact of the Church on the creation of the Calendar due to the need to fix Easter, and gives amiss to factors such as sea navigation, intercultural trade links etc, which were just as critical in the search for a universal time. Instead these are treated as anecdotes to illustrate the problems of a non-universal time, more as effects of changes made by the Church, rather than socio-cultural causes that led to the need for a Calendar.

In addition to all the above, the writing style makes the book a true chore to read. Filled with names, dates, names of towns and references to texts, paragraphs become extremely overloaded with junk information for anyone except the scholar interested in making chronological research notes. The other aspect that makes plain reading difficult is the frequently occurring capitals and years within paranthesis. A sample paragraph, picked almost at random is below.

"The bull itself was written in the fall of 1581, mostly by Pedro Chacon. On 20th October 1581 , he sent a draft from Turino to Cardinal Sirleto in Rome. Chacon then died a few days later, leaving the final version of the bull to be written by member Vincenzo di Lauri. Sirleto also dispatched Antionio Lilius, Aloysius's brother, to work with the pope's aides on the final bull at Mondragone, Gregory's favorite villa outside of Rome "

The good part of the book is that for someone unexposed to the frailties of time-measurement, this is definitely an eye opener in showing how recent the phenomenon of a universal time is. But even in the book being a non-scientific exposition, it falls far short of its own blurb which proudly announces the decision by Mao Zedong to accept the Gregorian Calendar as a seminal event, one which is treated in its entirety in a couple of paragraphs as compared to the entire book about the habits of monks and the "Ecclesiastical history of the English".Worth a read, not a buy though.