The Illustrated Longitude by Dava Sobel is a wonderful book which depicts the struggles of both humanity’s search for the measurement of longitude at sea, and the life of John Harrison. In my opinion, this book is a truly exciting and yet, still a very informative novel. Most nonfiction books spend more time establishing it’s information, drowning it’s reader in a sea of uninteresting, mostly unrelated facts. Other forgo the much needed information for personality and end up lacking any sort of true credibility...This is where The Illustrated Longitude really shines as a nonfiction novel. It is exciting enough to hold the reader’s attention The book itself is very well written and explains itself in very casual light, allowing itself to present it’s information in a very easily comprehensible way. This is the book’s strong suit as I’ll explain later. The book’s presentation style blends very well with the amount of information it presents, this added with the pleura of actual personal accounts, and stories create a very amusing atmosphere which ensnarls the reader in the story which the Author is spinning. Each of the parts of the book works in tandem to help keep strengthen this atmosphere, an example of this is the exciting race the author seems to create between the two very different longitudinal solutions (Time and Astronomy). …show more content…
All of these elements that the book uses to tell the story of discovering a truly, reliable method of finding Longitude work very well with one another to keep the reader entertained while also informing them at the same