Review of The Discoverers

This is an engaging and beautifully well-written history of science. Basically, imagine some of the most fascinating essays and magazine articles on science you've ever read, stick 'em in a 700 page book, and you have The Discoverers.

For those who actually want details on just how much this book covers, here is the shortest summary I could come up with:
- Humankind's first attempts at astronomy and time-keeping. (The history of clocks was probably my favorite part of the entire book, though the competition was quite fierce.)
- Geography, exploration, navigation, and the inventions of maps and atlases.
- The controversial sciences of Copernicus and Galileo, and the unpleasant reaction of the religious authorities.
- The first explorations into the world of microbes and the rather ghoulish beginnings of anatomy & medicine (another of my favorite parts).
- Isaac Newton and the formation of the long-titled Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. (There are some anecdotes in this part that give one the impression that Newton was not a particularly nice guy.)
- The history of zoology, botany, taxonomy, and the theory of evolution.
- Musings on human memory from Homer to Freud, the history of libraries (we can thank the monks for that), printing & book-making, and those illustrious and odd writers of the first generation of dictionaries.
- A history of history (because people used to just make that stuff up before Herodotus came along & he still made a lot of stuff up), archaeology, museums & preservation, anthropology, economics, & statistics.
- Finally, the end of this incredibly wide-ranging work summarizes progress in atomic theory (up to 1911, that is).

Anyway, I left out quite a bit, but you get the idea. And how many gob-smacking fun-facts and anecdotes are available to wow your nerdy friends and compatriots?
A plethora, folks. This book is fantastic. Go stuff your brain.