Gerry Martin

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.… (mehr)