Circles by James BurkeComic books have ruined me. Reading stories 22 pages at a time limits one’s attention span. I’m working towards building that back up all the time, but it’s books like James Burke’s CIRCLES that bring me back to that attention span problem. However, it’s well worth the ’sacrifice.’

James Burke is best known for his work on the British series, CONNECTIONS, which follows links through history from one event to another, until he’s found a way to link two completely disparate events together. It’s all about chaos theory and causality writ large. It’s an amazing show that I believe repeats on BBC America now. (We discussed it in the comments section of an entry on this blog previously.)

Burke also writes books. The one I’m reading right now is CIRCLES, a collection of 50 5-page articles he wrote originally for SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. This short essays follow the same idea that CONNECTIONS did, but compress them more tightly, use more loosely-connected events, and end up in a circle. The event that begins each essay leads to a widely diverse series of people and inventions and discoveries until it wraps back around on itself. It’s a fascinating look at how events and people intersect in unexpected ways.

Sometimes, the connections are a bit of a reach. And, often, you’re left with a sense of “so what?” as you read these essays. There’s not always a direct cause-and-effect to these connections. It’s often based on relationships and who knows who or is related to them. Does it really matter than Burke can link DNA fingerprinting to Prussian welfare, farm equipment, and astronomical calculations? Probably not. But in just the first five essays I’ve learned a lot about where certain things come from, in a similar way to Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story” entries on local radio. There’s always a pleasant surprise at the end of the chapter to punctuate the whole story.

What sells the book is Burke’s laid back manner of storytelling. He has a cheeky sense of humor that only erudite British writers possess. He doesn’t take the science too seriously and often pokes fun at his subjects. His prose is very conversational. Sometimes, you can almost hear him reading it out loud to you. It reads like a narrator’s script for a documentary. It is not dry and it is not boring. The connections come too fast and furious to fall into a rut. I’m just left wondering how many books you have to read and how much science and history reference material you have to have on hand to figure out these connections so readily.

CIRCLES is a fun romp through history, showing some of the unexpected connections between the technological, the political, the scientific, and the cultural. It’s some fun, albeit light, reading.