Opening paragraphs..................

Once on a Wednesday excursion when I was a little girl, my father bought me a beaded wire ball that I loved.  At a touch, I could collapse the toy into a flat coil between my palms, or pop it open to make a hollow sphere.  Rounded out, it resembled a tiny Earth, because its hinged wires traced the same pattern of intersecting circles that I had seen on the globe in my classroom - the thin black likes of latitude and longitude.  The few colored beads slid along the wire paths haphazardly, like ships on the high seas.
-Dava Sobel,  Longitude:  The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time