Gould's musing on various aspects of the millennium. Fine, but nothing particularly earth-shattering. ( )

A small book about the follies and fascinations of calendrics, especially as they pertain to the (then) upcoming millennium. Gould explains the millennial fascination from a Christian and secular point of view. He delves into the oddities of calendars, which amuse him as a very human attempt to impose order on Nature -- a Nature which refuses to use even numbers in its cycles of days, lunations and years. ( )

So I read this about 15 years too late, since Stephen Jay Gould wrote this during the lead-up to the the year 2000. But even with such a delay, it remains an unmitigated pleasure to savour the intelligence and clarity of this author, as he debunks myths and superstitions around calendrics in razor-sharp prose. ( )

Ease shows the Master's hand. Questioning the Millennium reads very easily, and is quite a light read. Whether it is worth to have it book length, is questionable. I would rather have it a bit shorter than the current 190 pp. Some parts of the book feel a bit "stretched" but never strained. There is some repetition, which could have been trimmed, and the ease with which it is written makes it at bit puffed up, but all the extra words add to readability.

This long essay was originally published in 1997, well before the Millennium Madness really began, and no attention is paid to what subsequently became known as the Millennium Bug.

Although the millennium moment now lies more than a decade behind us, it is still worthwhile to read this essay, as the discussion is not only about time, calendars and the millennium, but explores themes of apocalypse, armageddon and the destruction of the world and the postponement thereof. The confusion about the millennium moment, and what exactly counts as the millennium, that is not just the end, but the also especially beginning of the millennium, make the book much less ephemeral than expected. Phenomena such as (American) preachers predicting the end of the world are put in a clear perspective, not forgetting the Mayan calendar. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1767831.html

A brief and reflective book by Gould, on the coming millennium as seen from 1997. He makes the entirely fair point that the year 2000 is a rather arbitrary human construct in the first place, and quotes approvingly his autistic son's ruling on whether or not the new century begins in 2000 or 2001: "In 2000, of course. The first decade had only nine years." Nothing much new for me but gould as ever tells it well. ( )