For more recent perspective, magazines like Wired and Business 2.0 complete the picture.

This is a rambling and largely incoherent book - hardly a surprise given the range of topics and the length of the book. In apparent attempts at profundity, Rowland's vocabulary is frequently esoteric with a scholarly ring but the result is muddled, often incomprehensible ideas. For me, the overall effect was frustration bordering on exasperation.

If there is a single coherent theme in this book, it's the author's attitude towards science. While Rowland clearly has some acquaintance with science and technology he often lapses into pseudo-scientific, pseudo-intellectual bafflegab aimed at knocking 'science' down a peg or two. This approach is in tune with teachings in vogue in many 'cultural studies' faculties where science has been declared to be, at best, another 'social construct' with no universal principles (see quote below). Rowland would appear to be a victim and now a disciple of this unfortunate line of thinking.

In the end, it is possible that Rowland at least managed to achieve the goal stated in his subtitle "A search for wonder ....". He certainly left me wondering.

Quote re. postmodernist anti-science: the following quote from a 1994 address[1] by noted author and naturalist Edward O. Wilson provides a fairly apt description of Rowland's genre:

"Postmodernist critics present a Disney World representation of science, a fantasy of what science is, and how scientists work, and why they work, a distortion embellished variously by obsolete theories of psychoanalysis and the battle cries of political ideology. Within the academy, it seems to me that postmodernism and the divisive forms of multiculturalism are substantially a revolt of the proletariat, wherein second-rate scholarship is parlayed into tenured professorships and book contracts--not by quality, not by originality, but by claims of entitlement of race, gender, and moralistic ideologies."

Note 1. Keynote address, "Science and ideology" by E.O. Wilson, to the November 1994 convention of the National Association of Scholars in Cambridge, MA.

"Part travelogue, part philosophical treatise, part random musing -- perhaps it's more helpful to call it equal parts Plato, Robert Pirsig and Peter Mayle - it is a book of metaphysical rummaging, of thoughtful meandering." Globe and Mail newspaper

"delightful travel book-cum-philosophical exploration that will remind the reader of Robert Pirsig's eccentric 1970s classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." Bronwyn Drainie, Author and critic

"In the tradition of Stephen Jay Gould and John Ralston Saul, Rowland's reasoned observations are a much-needed tonic." Chapters review

"This beautiful book tells us about values and about how important it is that we get back to them over and beyond our trust in science and rationality. Paradoxically, Ockham's Razor has healing power." Derrick de Kerchkhove, Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology

"This book makes us question the values at the very heart of contemporary thought." Norm Bolen, History Television