Well, that sucks. He's one of my favorite authors. I recommend the audiobooks which he reads himself.
I especially liked "The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World" and "Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic".
I came to mention that book, known in the UK as "Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World" (same book, different title). Very good book.
If you're interested in that subject (starts around 1750s with Wilkinson boring out a cannon, then goes to James Watt because he needs a steam engine for his foundry. He sees James is struggling with a good seal due to cylinder tolerances. He uses the boring technique on a blank casting and the first industrial steam engine is born).
If you find this interesting, I don't recommend keeping the book on your bedside table because you won't want to go to sleep!
I never read his work, and I've been looking through his wikipedia, but I noticed he did the same with other books, slightly or completely different titles, is this due to what he felt the audience in each region would be more receptive towards in terms of a title, or is there another reason?
This is done by publishers all the time, perhaps the most famous being Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in the UK becoming the Sorcerer's Stone in the USA.
It's often done because of a perceived (or real) difference in phrasing that would go over differently on the other side of the pond.
Also, to emphasize that point, book titles can be changed even more in translation to other languages. There are many examples, and the weirdest are probably titles that are translated between languages like Japanese, Chinese and Korean to European languages.
A simpler example is Huxley's "Brave New World" which became “The Best of (All) Worlds” in some French editions[0]. It's a literary allusion which is meaningful in that culture.
Definitely one of the most profound books I've ever read. I come back to it on AudioBook from time to time because I love it so much. He narrates, so it's like being told a long and windy story from Gandolf or some other wizened master.
... but I salute his entire catalog! Literally everything he did is fascinating / easily digestible.
He wrote a fantastic biography of Joseph Needham, a chemist at Cambridge who learned Chinese in his 30s and subsequently created an exhaustively thorough history of scientific discovery in ancient China that was published as a gigantic set of encyclopedias. The research into Needham's wartime travels in China (relying on university and Foreign Office archives) was top notch.
Oh, that's too bad! I read my first Winchester, The Perfectionists, just this year, and a couple of other beside. Enjoyable and educational, the epitome of this type of non-fiction.
If you enjoyed Stewart Brand's Maintenance you probably would also enjoy Winchester's The Perfectionists. Below is Brand on Winchester [0].
Winchester’s book really shows how precision helps to drive progress. For Watt, a tolerance of one-tenth of an inch made his steam engines efficient. In Ford’s day, engineers and manufacturers could be precise at the level of a millionth of an inch. Today, chip fabricators have gotten things down to five nanometres. And, as the saying goes, a nanometre is to a tennis ball as a tennis ball is to the whole earth.
> Simon Winchester was born in London on Sept. 28, 1944. He was the only child of Bernard and Andrée Winchester (de Wael.) By some accounts, his father, a British soldier, was imprisoned in Nazi Germany at the time of his son’s birth. In interviews, Mr. Winchester has frequently suggested that, when he returned from captivity, his father was not enthusiastic about his young son and sent him to boarding school in England at around the age of 5.
That's not dumbing down; it's a difference in usage between one side of the Atlantic and the other. "Philosopher" doesn't have the same connotation in the US as it does in the UK, especially to children, the book's target audience.
I was also thinking of the above example, I do think "Sorcerer" has a more childish ring to it than "Philosopher". But then again, we are talking about children's books so it's still just marketing towards a target audience.
I especially liked "The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World" and "Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic".
But all of his works are great.
If you're interested in that subject (starts around 1750s with Wilkinson boring out a cannon, then goes to James Watt because he needs a steam engine for his foundry. He sees James is struggling with a good seal due to cylinder tolerances. He uses the boring technique on a blank casting and the first industrial steam engine is born).
If you find this interesting, I don't recommend keeping the book on your bedside table because you won't want to go to sleep!
It's often done because of a perceived (or real) difference in phrasing that would go over differently on the other side of the pond.
Also, to emphasize that point, book titles can be changed even more in translation to other languages. There are many examples, and the weirdest are probably titles that are translated between languages like Japanese, Chinese and Korean to European languages.
A simpler example is Huxley's "Brave New World" which became “The Best of (All) Worlds” in some French editions[0]. It's a literary allusion which is meaningful in that culture.
[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Meilleur_des_mondes
PS: The dictionary book was great. All of those slips!
Apologies for the zero content comment, but damn it, was looking forward to what he would write next.
... but I salute his entire catalog! Literally everything he did is fascinating / easily digestible.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/sep/28/biography3
Btw this book (and a handful of others) are available to read on Open Library: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL26819310M/
Glad he was so prolific before passing away.
An important book; one of several that perhaps exists in part because of the room in the market that was carved out by Dava Sobel's Longitude.