Excellent. Highly recommended. An interesting topic made all the more interesting by a fantastic writer. Read it. Today. ( )

Enjoyable way to learn a little about ancient China, and Needham's story is pretty interesting, too. I'll have to check out more of Winchester's books.

Why is it that the English have produced so many brilliant eccentrics who are fascinating to read about? Who knows, but they make great subjects for books.

Simon Winchester, who I know through his books on geological subjects from the explosion of Krakatoa to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake has now chosen as his subject Joseph Neeham. Needham was a brilliant biochemist and fellow at Cambridge University. He was also a dedicated Socialist, a high church Anglican who believed in liberation theology before the term was invented, a fan of Morris dancing, a nudist and an ardent womanizer. It was this last personality trait that led him to what became the great love & consuming intellectual work of his life. In 1937 he fell in love with a brilliant Chinese student with whom he began a lifetime affair. He became fascinated with China, taught himself the Chinese language and then talked himself into a diplomatic mission to Chungking (Chongqing in today's parlance). There his ever inquisitive mind started pondering what became known as the "Needham question:" why did China, which invented so many technological firsts suddenly around 1500 stop their inventive activity and become stagnant and "backward" for the next 450 years?

To answer this question, Needham first had to tell a doubting world the vast breadth of Chinese innovations from the inventing of printing hundreds of years before Gutenberg, to the compass, suspension bridges and even toilet paper (the impressive list is provided in an appendix to this book). In his quest for discovering the history of scientific invention in the country, Needham embarked on several treks during World War II that are described by some as adventures on the order of Indiana Jones and y others as the journeys of a fool-hardy idiot.

Upon returning home to England after the war, Needham began writing Science and Civilization in China describing the county's astonishing history of technological invention. The one planned volume quickly became seven and then ten and finally eighteen upon his death in 1995/

Along the way he befriended Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong, and ran afoul of Joseph McCarthy at the height of his red baiting fame. Yet through it all, Needham remained true to both his left-wing beliefs and to his magnum opus.

Simon Winchester tells this story with clear-eyed affection for his subject writing in a breezy style that is more fiction than academic study. For anyone who is fascinated with China, or with men who follow their own drummer, this is the book for you. ( )

Of all Simon Winchester's works, I have liked best his books which treat of books and book-people. His latest, The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom (Harper, 2008), falls into that category. I knew little of Winchester's subject (Joseph Needham) his works, or their subject (the history of science in China, broadly speaking) before I began this book, and thus may be blissfully unaware of any omissions or errors, but come away from it thinking that Winchester has offered a timely and well-written biography of a man utterly deserving of one.

Joseph Needham's most important contribution to scholarship is the grand opus Science and Civilisation in China, the first volume of which was published by Cambridge University Press in 1954. Twenty-three more volumes have followed to date, and although the work's pioneer has gone from the scene, publication continues (and seems likely to do so for the forseeable future). The series examines the history of science in China from its early roots, in minute detail (the two most-recently published volumes cover only Metallurgy and Ceramic Technology).

In the course of telling Needham's rather unorthodox life story, Winchester chronicles the bizarre process by which this Cambridge don (trained as a biochemist) came to undertake Science and Civilisation in China, having no professional expertise in either Chinese or history. And while this is interesting, it was Needham's biography itself which held my attention most keenly, perhaps because it can be compared to none other that I can think of. I guess if you're going to be eccentric, you might as well go all the way, and Needham certainly did that - his complicated love life alone serves to boggle the mind, but throwing in the nudism, the socialism, the sometimes problematic political activism, and it's nearly overwhelming.

What comes through most clearly about Needham, though, if all the strange habits are set aside, is the intense appreciation and respect he came to feel for China and its myriad cultural accomplishments, a monument to which his great work is meant to be. An impressive list of these achievements comprises Winchester's first appendix, pp. 267-277.

In general a very lucid and intriguing book. Two minor annoyances: the font chosen was lovely except for the fact that it employs an uppercase I for the numeral 1, making years look strange (I948, &c.), and there are no reference notes, which I would have liked.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2009/... ( )

I like Simon Winchester's work but this is a sloppy book with some lose facts marring a useful record of Needham's life and the enormous contribution he made to exposing China's civilization to the West. The book should include a list of all published volumes of Science and Civilization. ( )