The good thing about this book is that it covers the history of all sorts of measurement: capacity, distance, temperature, and many others less commonly known. The bad is that I continually had to overlook a bias in its presentation that I found at times to be very disconcerting.
One point that the author fails to note is that, whenever the metric system has been legislated in any country, it has been greatly resisted by the public, because, even though the units are designed to make for easy computation, they tend to be of an inconvenient size. People prefer to work with traditional units (a foot-size unit has been found in cultures from Britain to Japan!) and it is necessary to bring the full force of the law to bear to force them to adopt the unnatural metric units. And yet, it is the traditional units that the author continually denigrates with adjectives like "confusing."
In the author's mind, the metric system, in its modern guise as the SI (International System of Units; the abbreviation comes from the French name), is the high point of the story, and the US is behaving in a backward way for failing to embrace it. But in fact, while the SI has advantages for scientific communication (the units make computations necessary in physics easier, and the fact that they are universally understood all over the world aids in international communication), they are simply impractical for everyday use. This is why, even in countries that have officially adopted metric units, traditional units are still in common usage among the people, though often slightly altered to come out in round-number multiples of metric units.
If the author had scrapped his strong pro-SI bias, I would have rated it much higher than the 3-star rating I gave it. But needed to take this bias into account in rating it. Note that the book uses an obsolete definition of the meter -- but this is not unexpected, because it was originally written before the current definition was adopted.)
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