Some of the fluency stems from Bronowski's decision to put as much of the script for the TV series into the book as possible. Some of the fluency stems from Bronowski's greedy enthusiasm for intellectual adventure, including poetry (I still have his 1972 book William Blake and the Age of Revolution, and felicitously, a new scholarly monograph from Imprint Academic, The Happy Passion by Antony James, tells us a lot more about Bronowski's output). It proceeds briskly through what is by now the standard science-oriented western European version of human history – the Palaeolithic, the dawn of civilisation, the Greeks and the Romans, the Islamic empire, Galileo, Newton, the Industrial Revolution, Mendeleev, Pasteur, Darwin, Einstein and the nuclear age – and it still seems as good as any other history of discovery, and a great deal sharper and more readable than some. So The Ascent of Man should have a decidedly dated feel.īut it doesn't – not, at least, to this reader. In the intervening years, a hundred popularisers, practitioners and science historians have tried to tell much the same story, each time with more up-to-date information and a more acute sense of contemporary awareness. Now, 38 years later, the BBC has reissued it, with a foreword by Richard Dawkins but otherwise unchanged.

The book spun from the television series went on to sell millions. In 1973, thanks to a 13-part television series on BBC2, he had become one of the world's most celebrated intellectuals, and by the late summer of 1974 he was dead. In 1972 he was a little-known mathematician who knew a lot about the poet William Blake. ISSNĪn ISSN is a standardized international code which allows the identification of a serial publication.Īn ISSN consists of eight digits in two groups of four, separated by a hyphen.F ame has a momentum all of its own, but that does not explain the enduring recognition accorded to Jacob Bronowski.

The twelfth digit is a check digit and usually appears at the bottom right of the symbol.Įnter all digits found on the item (e.g., 008817006925).

The next ten digits encoded in the symbol are below the bars.

The first digit is the Number System Character (NSC) which appears on the left side of the symbol outside of the bars.Hyphens or spaces usually separate the elements of the The UPC appears as a barcode symbol with 12 digits printed below it. The Universal Product Code (UPC) is a barcode symbol that is used to track trade items in stores (e.g., audio and video products). Enter an OCLC number without leading zeros. OCLC assigns a unique number to each bibliographic record input into WorldCat. Thirteen-digit ISBNs must begin with either 978 or 979. An ISBN is a unique number assigned to an item by its publisher.

The ascent of man summary