Uglow continues to please with her well-written "stay up all night" works on our favorite period of history. In this volume she works her magic covering those great thinkers of the 18th century who were visionaries yet in some ways average men. The core five of the title are Erasmus (grandfather of Charles) Darwin, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, and Joseph Priestley. She also weaves around these friends stories of other discoverers, tinkerers, experimenters of the period whose curiosity and passion discovered and created a new way to understand the world. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY. Paper. 2002. USED. $4.00