SOURCE: Masters, Alexander. “A Messy Mathematician.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4958 (10 April 1998): 30.

In the following review, Masters offers a mixed assessment of Questioning the Millennium, asserting that Gould does not explore the issue adequately.

Stephen Jay Gould's questions [in Questioning the Millennium] are: What does “the millennium” mean, When does a millennium begin, and Why are we so interested in the subject, anyway? “I began to think about this book,” he writes, “during the first week of January, 1950.”

The first essay, “What?,” is the longest. It bothers Gould that we use the same word to mean entirely different things. A millennium is a length of time lasting a thousand years, not the transition at the end of a thousand-year period. And the Millennium, for which we are preparing with such eagerness and razzamatazz, is not a time of impending joy; it is the biblical time of Apocalypse. Gould's attempt...