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The story is very unusual in that it is unlike anything I have ever read before. Far fetched but at the same time scares the daylights out of you just thinking about it.
Lets face it. Opening up a door and looking down into a bottomless pit in your home with creatures in it, that are coming after you is enough to hold the interest of the most avid horror reader.
Highly recommend!! This is one of those finds that knowone knows what you are talkin about when you mention it to them, until now! You won't be disappointed!
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But it is probably as important to highlight its shortcomings, which show how much remains to be done. I do not pretend to do a general review, for which I am not qualified and that is quite impossible in a work of encyclopedic pretense like this one. I will restrain my commentary mainly to the treatment of the field of electricity and magnetism, which I suppose has its importance in scientific instrumentation and does not lack in amount and variety of instruments by itself. Its reflection in this book is very unfair and inadequate, in my opinion. All the entries that begin with "Electricity-Electrostatic" span a mere 20 pages, 7 of which are dedicated to medical applications (electrocardiograph, electroencephalograph, electromyograph and electroretinograph, to be precise). One will search in vain, on the contrary, for any mention to the electron tube, or valve, or thermionic device. The totality of what the editors and the authors have to say about radio waves and related topics is included under the clumsy entry of "Radio Wave Detector". Here the whole history of electromagnetism and of radio is dispatched in little more than one page, including all its apparatuses and "science". In this egregious page one finds the only mention I have been able to locate to the "thermionic diode" and the "triode", but not one reference to galena or silicon or germanium. Coils, resistors, resonance, oscillators or quartz crystals are not even mentioned per se. The arbitrariness of the selection of voices and of the espace allocated to individual items is reflected in the fact that "oscilloscope" , for a contrary instance, has an entry for itself of a full page an a half. Under the entry "Current meter" it is only spoken about devices to measure water flows.
Another example of what I consider a total lack of perspective could be the fact that almost 10 pages are devoted to several types of compass, whereas the whole subject of clocks is dispatched in 5 pages. The editors try to explain in the Introduction how they have managed to handle the question of What is a Scientific Instrument? The explanation is not very clear and the results reflect this. Whereas it is probably fashionable among historians of science and museum curators to consider "Escherichia coli" as a "scientific instrument", this kind of boutades and trade jokes should not justify the lack of rigour in the treatment of what are, and have always been, undeniable instruments of science. The book is a conglomerate of fair individual cards, but nobody seems to have taken care of the equilibrium of the whole file. For having so many illustrious authors, the work is quite poor, superficial and deceiving.
Cross-references are practically nonexistent and the main index is of no much help unfortunately for bridging the lacunae, being for the most part a mere reproduction of the entries of a work that is by itself alphabetically ordered. The typography, printing and other production aspects of the book are of good quality.
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