In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Simon Winchester, bestselling author of "The Professor and the Madman," brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham--the brilliant Cambridge scientist, freethinking intellectual, and practicing nudist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, once the world's most technologically advanced country.

Reviews

The masterpiece of the subtitle is Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China, a multivolume unfinished work documenting China's stupendous early achievements in science and technology. Winchester, the prolific British author of many acclaimed books (e.g., The Professor and the Madman), loses no momentum here. Needham (1900-95), a brilliant and somewhat eccentric Cambridge biochemist who became entranced with the study of China's early scientific advances, is well worth a biography, and Winchester is just the writer to undertake it. He explores Needham's fascinating and sometimes controversial personal life, his travels to China, and especially the significance and topicality of his scholarship on the early accomplishments of Chinese science and technology: why did China achieve so much so early, and why did it cease doing so for several centuries? Winchester carries the exploration further: now that China has resumed its technological advances, where will it take itself and the world? These are major questions superbly posed in an accessible and provocative book. Essential for all libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/08.]--Harold M. Otness, formerly with Southern Oregon Univ. Lib., Ashland Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

Joseph Needham (1900-1995) is the man who "made China China," forming the West's understanding of a sophisticated culture with his masterpiece, Science and Civilization in China, says bestselling author Winchester. In a life devoted to recording the Middle Kingdom's intellectual wealth, Needham, an eccentric, brilliant Cambridge don, made a remarkable journey from son of a London doctor through scientist-adventurer to red scare target. In Winchester's (The Professor and the Madman) estimable hands, Needham's story comes to life straightaway. From the biochemist's arrival in WWII Chongqing ("the smells, of incense smoke, car exhaust, hot cooking oil, a particularly acrid kind of pepper, human waste, oleander, and jasmine") to his steely discipline when crafting his research into prose (to an old friend: "I am frightfully busy. You come without an appointment, so I am afraid I cannot see you"), Winchester plunges the reader into the action with hardly a break. As the author notes in an outstanding epilogue--a swirling 12-page trip through the kaleidoscope of contemporary China--he is at pains to place Needham front and center in our understanding of the nation that now plays such a huge role in American life. B&w photos, maps. (May) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.