Longitude

Dava Sobel took a footnote in the history of science — an obsessive 18th-century clockmaker's four-decade quest to solve the longitude problem — and turned it into one of the most surprising bestsellers of the 1990s. John Harrison's battle against the scientific establishment to claim the Longitude Prize reads less like history and more like a thriller, and Sobel's prose is the reason. Under 200 pages, it never overstays its welcome. The caveat is that readers hoping for deep technical detail on the clockmaking itself will find the treatment brief. But as narrative science writing goes, this is as good as it gets — accessible to readers as young as twelve, and rewarding for adults who missed it the first time around.