Grasp Bomb, Book Compass: Joseph Needham The Great Secrets Of China Originated By Simon Winchester Text

book got me from the very start with his constant question of Why no developement, I was very impressed by the comment of former Secretary of State Haye Haye aboutto the effect that one could tell what policy to adopt for the next five hundred years by watching China, despite the at that time apparent lack of effect China had on the world.
What I love about the book overall is Needham's singleminded devotion to learning in detail about the language, although there is more than one, cultures and history of the land from which his mistress came, and then that he, she, and his wife shared that devotion.
And that, most importantly of all, he set the historical record straight on the most ancient accomplishments of Chinese civilization, things that even Chinese historians had not had or taken the time to dust off and publish.
Then he fought tooth and nail against racism and classism of all forms perhaps thanks to that stay with a working class family when he was a young boy.
What a tenacious and driven person, to whom we all owe a debt of history and following one's own conscience for the working classes, even if he was a bit overly naive at times.
As another man who loves Chinayears in Taiwan, I can't decide if Needham is just an interesting British eccentric or a total tool, Devout Christian, unwavering Communist, free love enthusiast and devoted nudist, Morris dancer and check that out on youtube if you're not familiar with it and according to the book allaround egotistical "fat head," Needham is certainly a character and his accomplishments in bringing the truth of China's early inventiveness to the West cannot be underestimated.
But do I actual like the guy By the end of the book, I still didn't know,

Couple of technical comments: While Winchester has just the right highclass accent to narrate his own book, his pronunciation of Chinese places and terms is just painful.
And in the epilogue, he mentions the Chinese using chopsticks for "decades" that's onlyyears! Should have been at least "centuries, " Also known as "The Man Who Loved China" in American editions because our versions are necessarily dumbeddown, this is the story of Joseph Needham's quest to understand an Eastern culture to which he was introduced in adulthood.
A professor of chemistry and one with no official qualifications to undertake a work of rigorous history, he embarked on one of the most ambitious, lengthy, and meticulously researched pieces of scholarship in human history.
At twentyeight volumes and still in print, "Science and Civilisation in China" is I would find out a modern masterpiece,

Simon Winchester has a loving eye for detail, and this is what fills his books with such wonder, He also seems to be more successful when the object of his inquiry is a character rather than a place or epoch see his brilliant "The Professor and the Madman" to American readers, vs.
the less regarded "Korea". Needham is a perfect study for Winchester's discerning talents at once brilliant, multilingual, hypersexual, a gymnosophist one of several new words you will learn charming and dashing, and, again, brilliant.
You will inescapably notice that Professor Needham bears no small resemblance to the author, who has a love for detail, and for whom no small morsel of knowledge is too frivolous to be examined and ingested.


Joseph Needham, a married man, was introduced to the Chinese language and culture by Lu GweiDjen, ayear old Chinese woman who was working in a Cambridge University laboratory under his supervision.
This is the fulcrum on which his life would begin to turn, with the full weight of history behind it, It would be such a shame to spoil his extraordinary journey with plotlike summations, As one never to be so blessed

with such tremendous mental gifts and interests, I can only understand his story like we enjoy a shootingstar, as a flash of brilliant, incomprehensible wonder, and, minding that Needham's death was atyears old, it is always gone too soon.
Simon Winchester never fails to entice the reader, and here in the audiobook version he marvelously reads his own book, He teaches effortlessly. He infuses humor into his lines, He writes about characters and places and times that are interesting, His books focus not only on the details but also encompass the larger picture you are delivered not only one man's life but also world events.


In this book we follow Joseph Needham from childhood to death, He lived from. He was a biochemist at Cambridge University, Inhe was sent to China by the Royal Society as the Director of the SinoBritish Science Cooperation Office to promote scientific cooperation, and author of momentous seventeen volume opus The Science and Civilization in China.
This is only a listing of his most prominent feats, During the Korean War he led an investigation of Americas alleged use of biological weapons, He established the scientific department of UNESCO, He was a womanizer, with a wife in Britain and a mistress in New York and a string of women in China too, His wife, his mistress and he were the best of friends, from beginning to end clearly he was of the Edwardian rather than the Victorian age! A socialist, a chain smoker, a lover of trains and fast cars and pretty women, lots of pretty women.
I am repeating that for emphasis, And foremost of all his loves was his love for China, instilled by his lifelong mistress of Chinese birth, She was from Nanjing. No children, the threesome's child was in fact China, Joseph Needham had one primary mission in life and that was to make the world aware of China's role in fostering innumerable scientific inventions, China was the first to invent the plow, the wheelbarrow, the kite and playing cards, the compass, the printing press, the stirrup, toilet paper, the umbrella, the smallpox vaccine, suspension bridges, tree grafts.
I have named but a few, Needham has calculated that China was the source ofmajor inventions per century, until the fifteen hundreds and then the creativity stopped, Needham looked at that too, and poses the Needham Question: why did it stop and what does the future hold for China All of this is covered in Winchesters and Needhams own book.


I questioned if Needham was only sent to China to promote scientific cooperation, It feels rather odd that while so many were killed in the JapaneseSino conflict, Needham was there solely to promote scientific cooperation, His travels in China during the war are both exciting and interesting, but was he sent there with another motive too That was a question I pondered.
Spies are mentioned, and yet Needham never reveals their secrets, I wish Winchester had covered this with more depth, but otherwise I loved the book,
Simon Winchester does the kind of research that could never be accomplished with a Google search, His work is layered and so impossibly thorough that reading his books makes me fearful that this kind of scholarship could become extinct with the quickdraw research that the net generation has become accustomed to.


The Man Who Loved China is about Joseph Needham, a researcher much like Winchester, In fact, it is very meta that one of the world's greatest researchers should write a book about one of the world's greatest researchers, Needham dedicated his life to documenting scientific discovery in China, Admittedly, I would not want to read any of the six volumes that Needham devoted his life to but I did enjoy reading about his journey.
He was a quirky but committed academic just the kind of men I appreciate, The people and places that crossed his path, seemingly serendipitously, make this story engaging and fun to read, This may not be knowledge that I'll use in my daily life but the holistic nature of the research is inspiring, Winchester's account of Joseph Needham shows a Needhamesque fascination with intricate detail be it the social world of Edwardian England or the topography of western China.
At the same time the author shares Needham's enthusiasm for enormous questions How much does the Western world owe to Eastern ingenuity What accounts for the flaring up or dying down of a society's intellectual drive All told, the book gives a highly thoughtprovoking tribute to Needham.
You gotta admire a guy whose passion for a Chinese woman led him to tear down walls of prejudice between civilizations,
Joseph Needham



A man with a beautiful mind, one seemingly forged for the hard sciences he worked in a college laboratory at Cambridge University specializing in embryology and morphogenesis betrayed itself with that willful miscreant known as love, and in this case it was a love for China.
Needham threw himself into the study of Chinese history and some thought at the time that he'd thrown away all he had to offer the world.
But he provided them wrong, proved there was more in him than they'd imagined, and more importantly, proved there was more to China than the west could've possibly have perceived.


As the start of my selfimposed studies of China I have a brother living there and well, everything's coming up China these days, so why not, I wanted to go with something not too taxing.
Their history is thousands of years long, very rich, seemingly complex to this uninitiated pupil, and with a language quite full of words and names as unpronounceable to me as they are impossible to consign to memory.
So I needed someone I trusted holding my hand as I took baby steps on mostly familiar ground to start with, Simon Winchester fit the bill, I've read a couple of his books before and enjoyed them for their lively rendering of past events that don't always seem that lively to begin with see the making of the Oxford English dictionary.
His topic this time was an Englishman to whom China was a new discovery of sorts, Thus I was able to learn a few things about a country as foreign to me as a foreign country can be without feeling overwhelmed or becoming inundated with facts, historical figures and dates, most of which would mean nothing to me the first time hearing them.
No, I've stayed away from the "From Yao to Mao"year history course offered by the Teaching Company that's been sitting in my ipod for a few weeks now.
I'll get to that soon enough, but first it's books like this and even novels like The Good Earth that will help ease me into this whole colossal leviathan that is China.



In a side note, I think a good story could be cobbled out of Needham's life and turned into a ripping good yarn for the big screen with Michael Palin in the lead.
He's a dead ringer!