The Discovery of Time - Stuart McCready (editor)

The story of how the human race has learned, with ever more astonishing precision, to record, compare, and think about measured units of time- an aspect of our experience that seems otherwise indefinable.

This book offers interesting chapters written by a variety of authors on the history of our understanding of time. It covers the earliest concepts of humans trying to define and understand the passage of time to modern theories. It contains lots of great pictures and illustrations that add greatly to the text. I found myself frequently staring at a picture of stonehenge or a sundial and pondering time.

The book is uneven with various authors composing chapters. It also moves too often into academic discussions that seem too detailed for a general interest book. One chapter brought up the importance of using time to calculate longitude. A great book on that discovery is Dava Sobel's Longitude.