science or early dinosaur discoveries to visit these Web pages (and some other exhibi- tions hosted by the Linda Hall Library and available from their home page at http://www.lhl.lib.m.us/).Itistobe hoped that more of this type of quality multimedia presentations will be presented on the World-Wide Web in the future.

Steven H. Schimmrich

A History of Modern Computing by I? E. Ceruui MIT Press, 1998. f24.95 hardback (x + 398 pages) ISBN 0 262 03244 4

For the talented historical storyteller, com- puting provides a rich pageant of intriguing characters - from eccentric geniuses, and hippy freedom seekers, to power-hungry corporations.

Sadly, Paul E. Ceruzzi is a historian, not a storyteller, and his style though rigorous, scholarly, even clinical, is more textbook than page turner. His latest book A History Of Modem Computing sets out to chart the development of the computer from the gar- gantuan mainframes of the late 1940s to the dull beige boxes that squat in the corners of our desks today.

With the exception of an excellent chapter on the development of computer software, the fust two-thirds of this book reads like the catalogue of obsolete computer hard- ware. Whilst he pays brief lip-service to the groundbreaking work done by the code breakers (both English and American) at Bletchley park during World War II, and by English computer scientists in producing the first stored program computer, the author concentrates mainly on the American computing industry.

The book begins well with an interesting account of the development of the stored program (Von Neumann) architecture, but

soon deteriorates into a tedious description of just about every mainframe computer produced up to the mid-sixties. I could find little of interest here as the author concen- trates far too hard on the business and hard- ware specifications. I felt I might have learned a great deal if he had spent more time describing why certain technologies were immediately important, while some only found their true potential when com- puting entered the interactive age, and yet others showed initial promise, but soon fell by the wayside. For example, spreadsheets were immediately useful, but e-mail took a couple of decades to take off. The relative popularity of graphics which shifted from vector graphics in the early days (to save memory), to bitmapped graphics in the late 1980s as memory became cheaper, to vector again towards 2000 as processing power means that similar quality can be produced using vector images calculated on the fly, giving a greater flexibility.

I was disappointed by the lack of analyti- cal discussion of artificial intelligence, which promised so much and delivered so little (as yet).‘This is surely the greatest fail- ure of global computing so far - not only companies, but countries spent huge sums and saw almost nothing for it, whilst cheap and cheerful AI is in relatively widespread use in computer games, office applications and industrial processing. What a contrast to the Internet (one of very few comparable computing projects that had government sponsorship, albeit on a smaller scale, which initially promised so little and is now revealing its global importance).

Other technologies that I’d have liked to have seen more of are co-operative software systems [such as OLE automation that point the way that users (rather than program- mers) will work in the future], the impact of software standards (both formal and de facto) on computer use, the invention of the software debugger (the unsung hero of the software world, which I would put on a par with the spreadsheet in terms of usefulness), visual-event driven software development, and copy protection (interesting in that its erratic usage patterns reflect the changing way that software has been viewed over the years. And, though I’m sick to death of them it would seem sensible to mention the Y2K problem and Java because, like copy protec- tion they both shape and reflect how we use computers.

My pet subject is palm top and other bat- tery-powered computing, and I felt that it should have been discussed, given that it shows signs of being a major factor in the spread of computing to people who would not normally be interested. Supporting tech- nologies such as liquid crystal displays, voice recognition and flash storage would also have been of some merit (the latter especially, given the extensive coverage of early mainframe memory technologies).

Convergence (I hate that word, but what else do you call it?) is a thread running beneath almost all modem computing -

0160-9327/QQ/$ - see front matter 0 1999 Elsevier Science. All tights resented.

indeed the success of any modem computer is restricted by its abilities to co-opt a mul- titude of peripherals in order to carry out a wide variety of tasks from navigation (GPS, route planning software), leisure (digital cameras and video cameras, audio players), and banking (electronic payment systems), to telephony. A round-up of the way that adding diverse peripheral devices has expo- nentially increased the usefulness of com- puters, whilst simultaneously presenting a barrier to the development of new comput- ing architectures would have rounded out the final few chapters nicely.

The final third of the book is a little more interesting to many people, and covers the development of Unix, the Apple story, and the amazing and seemingly endless rise of the Microsoft Corporation. At last the book seems to break from the ‘computing equals hardware’ mentality. True, Apple and Microsoft have been documented to death more entertainingly elsewhere [Levy’s Insanely Great’ and Cringeley’s Accidental Empires2 spring to mind, as well as others (Refs 3-6)], but Ceruzzi’s more scholarly style provides a different slant. He finishes the book off with a brief account of the development of the Internet and the World- Wide Web, which, like the earlier chapter on software, feels like it has been tacked on at the last minute to fill an obvious hole. It would have been much better to mix them in with the rest of the book, retaining the chronological order that the author other- wise favours.

Ultimately, I found myself disappointed by this book. Perhaps I was expecting too much when I imagined a roller-coaster ride through the research labs and garages of computerville, with stops along the way to meet the movers and shakers whose obses- sive excitement generated an industry more exciting than any other. I’m talking not about computers, but about the software industry. Ceruzzi seems to miss the point that software is the computer, and that that has always been, and will always be, the case. Hardware is therefore only important in the context of the software that will run upon it. I have no doubt that A History of Modem Computing will be bought by many who, like myself, thirst for a comprehensive account of how the industry reached its cur- rent point, with insightful observations on the interdependencies between its various technologies. Those who make the effort to wade through the statistic-laden early chap- ters will find something to please them, but I suspect that many will continue their search elsewhere,

References 1 Levy, S. (1995) Insanely Great, Penguin 2 Cringely, Robert X. (1993) Accidental

Empires, Penguin 3 Levy, S. (1994) Hackers - Heroes of the

Computer Revolution, Penguin 4 Wallace, J. aad Erickson, J. (1992) Hard

Dn’ve - Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsofi Empire, John Wiley & Sons

5 Wallace, J. (1997) Overdrive: Bill Gates

Endeavour Vol. 23(2) 1999 83

and the Race to Control Cyberspace, John Wiley & Sons

6 Campbell-Kelley, M. (1996) Computer -A History of the Information Machine, HarperCollins

Adrian Green

To the Arctic! by J. Mirsky University of Chicago Press, 1998. $16.96/f13.30 paperback (xxv + 334 pages) ISBN 0 226 53179 1

Jeannette Mirsky’s To the Arctic! is an old and trusted friend of readers interested in the history of Arctic exploration. Its fist edition, under the title To the North! appeared in 1934. It was reissued in 1948 and in 1970, somewhat enlarged and updated, with new prefaces. The present soft-cover edition appears identical to the 1970 one and it includes the introduction by the explorer Vilhjaimur Stefansson (who could not resist a dig at the Royal Navy) and the author’s prefaces to the 1948 and 1970 editions.

It is no easy task to write a readable yet accurate narrative stretching across the cen- turies from the Ancient Greeks almost to the present day. In this, however, the author succeeds admirably. No less a caustic critic than Stefansson called the book ‘the best history of northern exploration yet to be written’. The canvas is broad, not only in its time-scale, but in its scope, which is cir- cumpolar. The unveiling of the Russian and Siberian mainland and islands, of Greenland, the North American Arctic and Spitsbergen is all included. The author wrote in her preface of 1970:

To the Arctic! is about the earthbound days when Arctic explorers were iso- lated for years by silence and distance, when transportation was by dog sledge and ship, on foot and in frail craft, when the wealth of the north was in fish and furs and whales. In those earthbound days if the odds were greater, so were the opportunities; to be an explorer was a choice open to all. The story, then, told in this book has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The saga is finished - it is a chapter in our past that we can still understand.

In the preface to the 1948 edition, she remarks that the book tells‘the whole story of an adventure that, for Europeans, began with the Greeks and finished in our day’. She also elaborates upon what it does not contain:

It does not trace the movements of Arctic peoples who have left no written record...It does not include everything on Arctic aviation or anything about Arctic warfare...It does not include every expedition dedicated to scientific problems, the study of ocean currents, weather conditions, flora and fauna.. .

84 Endeavour Vol. 23(2) 1999

Jeannette Mirsky’s prose is extraordinarily concise and yet vivid. Writing for instance of the first party to winter in 1630 on Spitsbergen, she says: ‘They killed reindeer, foxes, walrus and bears; the fat gave them light...the skins protected them from the intense rigors’ of winter in a land where cold, like a vampire, sucks the very blood from the heart, cracks rocks with the report of thunder; where their breath fell like snow on the floor of the hut.. .where iron carried off whatever skin it touched; where clothes lifted out of boiling water immediately became as stiff as armor’ (p. 55).

A very different book, with the same scope as To the Arctic!, was published by Garland in 1994. Clive Holland’s Encyclopedia of Arctic Exploration is an enlarged chronology of 700 pages ranging from circa 500 BC to 1915. Some 2000 expeditions are listed, with a summary of each, a brief bibliography and short biogra- phies of the explorers. More akin to Mirsky’s work is Richard Vaughan’s The Arctic: a History (Alan Sutton, 1994), again a masterly account, which does cover the native peoples and with an emphasis too on the importance of maps.

It is good to welcome this reprinting of Mirsky’s book for a new generation of readers.

Ann Savours

By the Light of the Glow-Worm Lamp edited by A. Manguel Plenum Press, 1998. $19.95 paperback (ix + 373 pages) ISBN 0 306 45992 2

This collection of 38 extracts from writings about the natural world is, like all such anthologies, a reflection of personal taste and choice. Even allowing for this, I found this volume considerably eccentric. Beyond the actual selection, the Editor seems to have contributed rather little. The introduc- tion is an idiosyncratic, slightly precious, account of the evolution of writing on nature from Virgil to the present (in three pages!), which from the 1700s onwards serves to mention some of the writers whose works have been selected for the volume. Surprisingly, none of the individual pieces is introduced or placed in context, espe- cially with some indication of how, when and why they may have been written.

The extracts that work best are, perhaps unsurprisingly, by the gifted professional writers, notably D. H. Lawrence’s evocation of flowers in Tuscany, Herman Melville on the Galapagos, Maeterlinck on ants, Nabokov on butterflies (though really on the passions of collector-taxonomists) and Annie Dillard on a grasshopper meadow. All these pieces conjure images and convey emotion by evocation and verbal vignette and not by detailed description and exam- ple. Moreover, for me, they all pass the real test - of leaving you wishing to read more of the article or book involved. Other well-

known writers fare less well; the extracts from Thoreau, Twain, Defoe, John Clare and Manley Hopkins are leaden or quixotic - particularly given the rich seam of choice - by comparison.

For the most part, the naturalists writing about their travels, discoveries and obser- vations are rather prosaic by comparison. They provide interesting, though often too earnest, accounts of fact but all too sparsely enlightened with illuminating sketch and anecdote which catches the essence. rather than the fabric, of their subject. Again. the exceptions are those well recognized for their wordcraft, insight and originality: Darwin (on the Falklands), Waterton (on Amazonian birds), Fabre (on parasitoid wasps), Carson (on the intertidal zone).

Apart from a long, albeit competent, piece by a professional nature writer (Barry Lopez on narwhal), most of the rest are less than memorable. Indeed even the titles of some arouse one’s worst misgivings: ‘Heavenly Place’, ‘A Ramble in May’, ‘The Temple of the Hills’, ‘Common Fish of an Indian Garden’, which the contents do noth- ing to dispel. Several would make excellent parodies of the genre and the article on the ‘Falls at Niagara’ make Baedeker Guides sound poetic. It is hard to conceive how the anthologist included these at all, particularly at the expense of any of the descriptions of the outdoor world by the great explorer-travellers (e.g. Doughty, Hedin, Thesiger) or by those most renowned as acute observers of animal and plant life(e.g. Lorenz, Tinbergen, von Frisch). Overall, it is hard to recommend this compendium. other than as a Christmas stocking filler.

Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830 edited by Z Fulford and PJ. Kitson Cambridge University Press, 1998. f37.50 hardback (xi + 287 pages) ISBN 0 521 59143 0

Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernit! by S. Makdisi Cambridge University Press, 1998. f35.00 paperback (xv + 248 pages) ISBN 0 521 58604 6

The recent trend to study science in its social, political and cultural context has lead historians of science into unexpected fields. For those seeking the roots of modern sci- ence, few areas have been as intriguing as the history of travel, colonialism and imperi- alism. Colonial studies are rich in possi- bilities: much of the creation of modern sci- ence by Europeans went hand in hand with colonial expansion and the expansion of the traveller’s horizons, from the age of sail to Darwin. To understand modem science properly, we now must join the attempt. already well under way among historians

0160-9327/99/$ - see front matter Q 1999 Elsevier Science. All rights reserve0