Just a Second: A Different Way to Look at Time (review)

Jenkins has a full and varied catalogue of vivid approaches to natural history, and here he takes a new tack by chronicling chronology itself. Each spread focuses on a unit of time, offering eight to ten thumbnails with information about what occurs during the interval (the "In One Second . . . " pages mention, for instance, that "a bat can make 200 high-pitched calls" and "a hummingbird beats its wings 50 times") while also providing a brief explanation of the history behind the unit of time measurement, explicitly differentiating between time units based in nature (the day, month, and year) and those wholly manmade (the second, minute, and week). The examples are thoughtfully chosen, with close comparisons (the one-minute heart rates of an elephant, a crocodile, a hamster, and a human adult and child) sharing space with broadly varied information (how many pounds of rice are harvested, the record rainfall); there are recurring themes of consumption, production, and movement, but they're interpreted in broad and creative ways. While details of the natural world predominate, aspects of human-made industry and technology thread through as well, and the pressure of human habitation is clearly documented. This is a fascinatingly different way to approach natural history as well as time, and it invites curricular activities such as searches for additional statistics—and just observing a moment of stillness and noting what's happened within that time. The book concludes with a compact visual timeline of the history of the universe, a graph indicating the changing and growing human population in the last quarter of a millennium, a comparative visual timeline of lifespans in the natural world, and a timeline of timekeeping itself.