Scott Christianson (1947–2017)

I bought this on a whim, because it's just a gorgeous book, chock full of old book covers. I figured I'd be interested in the contents too, of course, but was prepared, based on the title, for a lot of hyperbole.

Not so much really. I'd say the editors did a fantastic job of choosing books that most people would agree significantly affected, if not changed, the course of society. I enjoyed the narratives written for each one too; I learned at least a little something about each book, in spite of at least 95 of them being familiar to me already.

I knocked the rating back a little because some of the choices would have had a more localised influence than others (A Book of Mediterranean Food and The Cat in the Hat come most quickly to mind), and because there was a slight but noticeable political bias to the choices. Whether that bias was the editors' or history's, I don't know, and I can't argue the impact most of these books had, so it's a pretty small quibble really.

A nice book for the bibliophile or the armchair historian who enjoys the trend of history through objects.… (mere)

As an Infographic nut I love this wonderful little book, Scott Christianson's 100 Diagrams That Changed the World. Each diagram includes a photo or reproduction starting with the Cave Drawings done 30,000 years ago in France all the way to a diagram of the iPod. In between you'd be quite surprised to learn that the first bar chart was created by William Playfair in 1786 (or at least I was). Or that the first exploded view diagram was created by Mariano Taccola way back around 1450.

I was very pleased to find not only the expected entries by da Vinci and Descartes, but a diagram from my personal hero Ben Franklin for his bifocals. I was surprised to learn that Bacteria was first diagramed by Leeuwenhoek back in 1683. 1683! There are some interesting call-outs like for Ikea's Flat-Pack Furniture (1956) which makes me want to curse when I read it, and even Carl Sagan's Pioneer Placque which shipped out into space in 1972.

My only beef with this book lays in the design itself. Seriously--what is up lately with graphic designers not being able to design for print? Each entry has a couple introductory sentences which are printed in such a light gray as to be unreadable in the evening by a person over their forties. It has to be readable folks! That is the point!… (mere)

Par le biais des autorités, la firme américaine DuPont de Nemours a pu tester dès 1924, sur un condamné à mort dans le Nevada, l'efficacité de l'acide prussique. En Allemagne, le procédé de fabrication du gaz Zyklon B appartenait au trust I.G. Farben. Officiellement, il devait servir à détruire les animaux nuisibles. Mais, les nazis au pouvoir l'expérimentèrent sur des prisonniers soviétiques à Auschwitz dès 1941. Erwin Respondek, économiste de I.G. Farben, a fait passer les informations sur les gaz asphyxiants et leur réelle utilisation via l'ambassade américaine. Peine perdue... (fonte: programme-tv.net)… (mere)