JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
I picked up another Book-with-a-year-for-a-title book today, Eric Burn's 1920, the Year that Made the Decade Roar (Pegasus, 2015). This series has a special interest in our house, and something I've paid attention to for a long time. For me, I've enjoyed finding Big Years for the History of Stuff, mainly in the history of science and technology and arranged some mental data around them. (Years when tons-of-stuff happened, like 1543, 1859, 1932, 1939, 1948.) So naturally seeing 1920 made me think of the scitech achievements for that year, and frankly there was only one that popped into my head: Robert Goddard's "Methods of Reaching Extreme Altitudes", one of the few big papers that uses the word "extreme" in the title. There's another effort by A.A. Michelson late in his career where he measures the diameter of a star other than the sun for the first time. And then there's the coming of Richardson Numbers with Lewis Fry Richardson (a long-time favorite of mine, along with Goddard)--so there are several major and near-major papers for a year that I haven't thought about too much, especially in the social area, where this books takes place, so it should be an interesting read.
There's a good hundred+ titles of books that are years--the ones I can speak to and suggest include the following (chronologically listed, of course): 1215 (Danzier), 1861 (Goodheart), 1913 (Ham), 1919 (Dos Passos), 1919 (Klingaman), 1939 (Overy), 1945 (Beevor), 1945 (Dallas), 1968 (Kurlansky), 1984 (Orwell), 1985 (Burgess), and 2001 (Clarke). For some reason there's nothing here for 1066.
It seems as though there are at least 26 years of the 20th century that have a book dedicated to them--and probably there are more. It would be an interesting collection to see them on two shelves! (The years that I can see offhand include 1900, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1916, 1919, 1920, 1923, 1929, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1945, 1948, 1954, 1959, 1960, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1984, 1985.)
Movies with years-as-titles is another story...
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