Book review.

Here's A Book That Will Change Your View Of The World

January 22, 1997|By Reviewed by David Shribman, Boston Globe.


By Alfred W. Crosby

Cambridge University Press, 245 pages, $24.95

Here are the elements of an improbable page-turner:

1. The author is a professor of American studies, history and geography.

2. The volume is so loaded with footnotes that some pages have less than one paragraph of text.

3. Many of the people who drift in and out of the story are people you've never heard of and will never remember.

4. Some of the subjects covered between its pages are such favorites as place value in mathematics, usury, the principles of navigation and the sheer beauty of double-entry bookkeeping.

OK, so maybe you're not hooked. But even if there isn't something for everybody in "The Measure of Reality," University of Texas professor Alfred W. Crosby does provide some remarkable insights on modern culture. He argues that modernity rests on measurement and then sets out, in separate chapters on time, space, music and art, to prove his point.

This is a signal achievement, even for those of us who don't remember that the square of the hypoteneuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. But just as measurement (whether in distance, in monetary value, even in musical time signatures) changed everything, so, the modern reader will see, does the recognition of that fact. This, then, is one of those rare books that changes the reader's view of the world just beyond the page.

Here's just one example: Crosby's argument that measurement made music possible. Rhythm, after all, is nothing more than the arrangement of time. And Crosby points out that written music fixes pitches in relation to each other. "The musical staff was Europe's first graph," he explains. "It measures the passage of time from left to right, and pitch according to position from top to bottom."

All of this is set down in elegant prose, requiring, like the learning of the age the period covers (1250-1600), leisure and thought.

Crosby sees grace in the worst nightmares of high-school algebra and geometry. Mathematics, he argues, is "glorious because in its generality it is powerful enough to tempt us to tackle the biggest mysteries--for instance, the nature of the universe, physical and metaphysical--with its aid."

And that is the key. You can't understand anything unless you understand, and master, measurement. Measurement is the ladder that allows us to peer into the heavens and into the smallest grain of sand.