The Calendar (David Ewing Duncan)

Describing a story that still has not run its full course, this book takes on the challenge of covering calendar designs from Mayan civilisations to the present day. The subject-matter is immense and covers Babylonian, Indian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Medieval attempts to measure, define and unite the lunar, sidereal and tropical years. With a heavy emphasis on the difficulty of defining Easter, the book focuses on the disputes with the Catholic church in the Middle Ages, culminating in the Definition of the Gregorian calendar, describing the various people involved in previous attempts to reform the calendar an the people who succeeded. But this results in a long rambling synopsis of a millennium of European history, with various bits of Indian, Arabic and African stories thrown in.

The book covers a huge amount of detail about the various attempts to define the calendar, but falls between scholarly and coffee table science book. Touching on the science and people involved, the book fails to grip in telling an interesting story, but is adequate at informing. I was interested in the description of riots over the imposition of the Gregorian calendar, with the loss of 10 days in most of Europe (11 in England) as I have previously found this is disputed by some.