ABOUT TIME By David Rooney

I convinced myself not to review David Rooney’s About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks. Twice, in fact— once before I read it, and then again after. On the third consideration, though, I decided to write about it after all, though this will come with a lot of caveats and qualifiers, in the form of the explanation for why I twice decided not to review it.

The first time was, as I said, before I read it, for the simple reason that it seemed too close to my own new book (A Brief History of Timekeeping, released just this week in the US, and next week in the UK). My heart sank when I first saw the announcement of this, actually, because from the title at least it seemed to be exactly in my lane, and worse yet, it was published first.

That initially seemed to preclude reviewing it, because if I didn’t end up liking the book, any negative comments I made could be perceived as sour grapes at best and attempted sabotage at worst. This, of course, greatly overstates my ability to influence the sales of anyone else’s books— if I had the power to move units, I’d be a lot more well-known than I am— and on calmer consideration, I decided it wasn’t out of line, after all. And, you know, I needed to at least read the book to know what was in it, and once I did that, I might as well write a review…

(To further assuage my sense of ethics, I did two other things: 1) I delayed writing this review until now, after my own book is out and well after the point where anything I say would directly impact the peak sales period for Rooney’s book, and 2) I paid my own money for the book (at a local independent store) rather than trying to cadge a review copy from the publisher. I don’t know that these hold any real moral weight for anyone else, but they make me feel better about the whole business.)

The second time I decided not to review it was after reading it, and for almost the exact inverse reason of the first time. That is, this is so much not doing the same thing as my book that it almost doesn’t feel right to compare the two. And, having gone into it expecting it to be like my book, I was sufficiently disappointed that it would be hard for that not to color my review.

Again, on calmer reconsideration, I decided that there actually is a point in making the comparison, because they illustrate two very different approaches that are packaged in superficially similar ways. That said, you should be aware of the issue of frustrated expectations coloring what I have to say. Thus, this lengthy preamble.

So, what’s the difference in approaches that led to my frustration? It’s pretty much spelled out in the subtitles. In the case of my book, that’s “The Science of Marking Time from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks,” and having “Science” up front is no accident. My primary focus in the book is on the science, and trying to have readers come away knowing more about that— the astrophysics that make sundials and solstice markers work, the mechanics of fluid flow and pendulum motion, the quantum physics of atomic clocks and the relativity of space and time. The historical framing is there to make the science more approachable to non-scientists.

Rooney’s book, on the other hand, is subtitled “A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks,” and again, the word order is no accident. This is a history book, first and foremost, and the scientific and technical aspects of the clocks he considers are little more than an afterthought. Many of the specific clocks he considers are not all that significant in and of themselves as clocks— not the first examples of their type, or even the most notable— but they have a kind of metaphorical significance for talking about more general historical trends and patterns. It’s using the clocks as a frame to get people to read general history.

I hope you can see how going in expecting one of these approaches and getting the other would be frustrating. The best illustration of this is probably the fifth of Rooney’s twelve clocks, the monumental Samrat Yantra in Jaipur, India. This is an enormous sundial, constructed in 1734 by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, and is not a clock I had researched in any depth for my own book, so I was excited to learn more about it. In the course of discussing Jai Singh’s reasons for building it, the book describes his repeated attempts to get access to results from European astronomers, and writes:

As soon as he saw the first of du Bois’s translations of the tables in 1731, Jai Singh discovered that the data they contained, and those of other tables he had acquired, did not match his own observations.

My ears perked up when I read this, thinking we were about to get a discussion of why there was a discrepancy between the two sets of data, and how it was eventually resolved. No such explanation is forthcoming, though, because Rooney’s interest is not in the Samrat Yantra as a scientific instrument, but as a metaphor, to introduce a brief discussion of the history of generating and disseminating knowledge. Which is perfectly fine, but left me unsatisfied. (I still don’t know the answer, by the way; I’ve been too busy to try to dig it up…)

So, again, this is a book about history that makes some use of timekeeping instruments, not a book about the history of science, or a book about time and timekeeping. It’s essential to calibrate your expectations accordingly.

If you go in with the proper expectations, this book does have a lot to recommend it. Rooney opens each chapter with an anecdote regarding the specific clock he’s framing the chapter around, and these are vivid and compelling. The introduction, connecting the KAL 007 tragedy in 1983, where a Korean passenger jet was shot down after straying into Soviet airspace, to the debut of the Global Positioning System, is a particularly nice bit of writing. And the book as a whole covers an impressive sweep of history, drawing from many different cultures and traditions, over a span of thousands of years.

There is one thing, though, that I think is a weakness even after recalibrating expectations to accept the more metaphorical role played by the timekeeping devices that the book is framed around. (Though, to be fair, I can’t swear my reaction here isn’t colored by that initial frustration…) That is, a lot of the conclusions drawn from the history being discussed feel both rote and of the moment. The sixth clock, the time ball in Cape Town, is mostly used to set up a discussion of the evils of slavery and imperialism. The ninth, an observatory clock in Edinburgh, starts a discussion of the problems of capitalism and control. The eleventh, a set of atomic clocks in Munich, brings in a discussion of the morality of war.

None of these sections are bad, or the slightest bit inappropriate in the context of the overall project, but nothing that’s in them feels revelatory. Or meaningfully related to time or timekeeping. Some of the discussion has a very obligatory feel— a book about world history in 2020 is compelled to include an explicit denunciation of racism— and at points it teeters on the edge of being preachy in a very choir-directed manner. It’s also all very downbeat in a characteristically 2020 sort of way— for my taste, there’s a little too much “everything sucks, and always has” and not enough celebration of the human ingenuity and innovation that makes this whole long story possible.

(I will pause to admit that this review probably feels very much of the moment, too, in that it’s highly meta and arguably self-indulgent. Welcome to 2022.)

But, as usual, these criticisms are largely a Me Thing. On the whole, this is a solid and well-researched history, showcasing an impressive breadth of knowledge, with some extremely vivid literary flourishes. Provided, of course, that you go in looking for history with a little science and technology for flavor, not the other way around.