In his book "Time Lord" Clark Blaise takes our "time" to show off his knowledge of Art and Literature under the guise of writing about Sir Sandford Fleming: a man who claims to have created "standard time" The biographical stuff on Fleming could have been handled in one chapter or less. In fact, most of it was probably cropped from Fleming's egotistically titled autobiography Empire-Builder.

Blaise takes any opportunity to link a subject he knows well to time. He would have the ability to link a sentence such as: "Van Gogh took his time in painting" to a chapter on Van Gogh's artistic style. Actually, he mentions Van Gogh's interest in Japanese woodcuts nearly as often as he mentions Fleming and his debacle with the Canadian Pacific Railway.

By stating that 'works of art are timeless', Blaise is able to launch into nearly a whole chapter on a painting by Gustave Caillebotte. While that may have been of interest to art students, it added little to one's understanding of Sanford Fleming or standard time.

What started off as an interesting read about time, turned into a boring display of Clark Blaise's knowledge of art and literature. He drops hundreds of famous names in art as a way of showing that he knows who they were and his reader may not. As the former head of the International Writing Program at University of Iowa, he should know better. My rating of this book 2 stars, but you may stop after Part One. The rest is fluff.

Richard Stampfle Nong Khai, Thailand

Any time you ask "What time is it?" or look at your wristwatch or catch a plane, you are in dept to Sir Sandford Fleming. Who? He is just one of those invisible engineers no one has heard of, but his big idea affects all of us every day. Clark Blaise tells his story in _Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time_ (Pantheon Books).

Fleming was born in Scotland, and immigrated to Canada to do surveying. His jobs got bigger and bigger, and he traveled. When he missed a train in Ireland in 1876 because the schedule read p.m. when it should have read a.m., he wondered why, if there are twenty-four hours in the day do we not number them to twenty-four, but assume people can only count to twelve and have to do it twice? It is amazing that no one had had this particular inspiration before, but it was just a starter. For centuries, the world didn't really have a time standardization problem. There was not enough mobility for people to notice that one town's time was not synchronized with another's. Each town had it's own sundial, or an acting astronomer who would compute the meridian of the sun, calculate noon, and fire a gun or run up a flag when the time came. Solar noon moves about twelve miles westward every minute along the most populated parts of North America. Trains moved fast enough to show that meridians were different at every longitude. This not only meant that if you took the train from Boston to New York, you would have to reset your watch. It meant that train companies had to keep track of unimaginably complicated calculations to keep their trains running on time. Each train company kept its own time based on where it's headquarters were, so that in Buffalo, for instance, there were three official times because three railroads served the city; in St. Louis there were six official times.

The climax of the book, and of Fleming's successful thinking on time standardization, came with a series of international conferences, culminating in the 1884 Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C. Blaise's description of the conference is great fun, with scientists having to act like diplomats, and those French trying to keep from being humiliated by having to accept a prime meridian in any other country. It was eventually a commercial decision, not entirely what Fleming had planned, and certainly not what the French had wanted. Most shipping was done by navigational charts based on Greenwich, and so the nations voted to make that the prime meridian, although the French abstained and four years later defined their mean time as "Paris mean time, retarded by nine minutes, twenty-one seconds;" this put them in exact accord with Greenwich, without having to mention that detested London suburb.

Blaise has done an outstanding job of bringing some deserved light on Fleming. He has also put some pleasant essays in on how standardizing time affects art and literature, but they are certainly digressions in what is an inspiring story of a man with a good idea and how it changed the world.

If you are looking for a straightforward and potentially superficial narrative on the history of standard time, Time Lord is unlikely to satisfy. But if you enjoy writers who challenge and delight with bold ideas and stirring insight, Time Lord by Clark Blaise will surely earn a favored spot on your bookshelf. Blaise is no ordinary writer and Time Lord is no ordinary history book. It may not be an easy read throughout, but it is definitely a compelling and rewarding one for any reader who revels in being roused to think and reflect. Rather than take the obvious and well-trodden paths of conventional biographies, Blaise has produced an enlightening treatise on time in a style that is at once literary and accessible. Yes, dates, places, people and events are offered. Sir Sandford Fleming's story is ably told. And wonderful anecdotes are related. "Notes on Time and Victorian Science" is a particularly fascinating chapter, especially in its description of what happened when the telegraph came to outlying Scottish villages in the early 1850s: "Country folk appeared with their messages tightly rolled, imagining they'd be able to jam them, literally, through the copper wires." (It gets even better!) But what Blaise does best is to transport the reader beyond the obvious, providing unexpected insights (personal and historic) on the creation of standard time and its impact on the world around us - including art, literature and, of course, the standardization of train schedules. On first read, "The Aesthetics of Time" would seem to be the most problematic chapter. Although beautifully written, it initially begs the question: does it really belong? On second reading, however, it emerges as the most daring and rewarding chapter, with the potential to forever influence the way you read a classic novel or view a great work of art. Time Lord is a remarkable tour of the Victorian Age and Clark Blaise is a skilled and illuminating guide. It is most definitely worth the journey.