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Title | Carry on, Mr. Bowditch | |
Author | Jean Lee Latham | |
# of Pages | 256 | |
Best for Ages | 10-14 | |
# of Clovers | | |
# of Times Read |  | |
Setting:
This book takes place around the late 1700's to the early 1800's. The main character is Nathaniel Bowditch, a sailor with a knack for mathematics. The genre of this book is non-fiction, and it is told in third person.
Plot:
Nathaniel Bowditch was a mathematician from the town of Salem who wrote books on sailing and navigation. As a boy, he was too small to be a sailor, so he was apprenticed to a chandlery. (A chandlery is a ship where you can buy things for sailing or for your boat.) During he taught himself complex math such as algebra. Nathaniel also thought himself how to read Latin and how to read and speak French. He collected his learnings into a book called "The American Practical Navigator". Nathaniel received letters from people at famous colleges such as Harvard and Cambridge, but he never had the chance to go. Eventually, he got on board a ship, where Nathaniel went to far-away places such as Europe and the Philippines. During some of these journeys, he identified errors in common seafaring texts such as John Moore's "The Practical Navigator". Nathaniel also taught the crew how to work seafaring instruments such as lunars.This book is the story of Nathaniel Bowditch, and his journey from overshadowed apprentice to one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.
Recommendation:
This book was a pretty biography of someone I had never heard about before. Nathaniel is portrayed as a smart man who is willing to teach others. This book is also kind of sad because a lot of his relatives die at sea. I like how this book wasn't filled with a lot of dates, because it showed that the main focus of the book was Nahthaniel. Overall, this was a good book, and I enjoyed it. I'd recommend this book to someone who wants to learn about sailing, or someone who needs a biography to read.