The book compares the history of thermodynamics with a rational, fully mathematized and uninterrupted organization of this discipline as obtained from hindsight and only recently completed by the author. Thus the historical course of events appears as a tragicomedy, partly as a "murky swamp of darkness". The reader must constantly go back and forth between the actors on the stage, who, of course, do not yet know the solution of the knots, and Truesdell, who does. Mottos from Dante concerning smoke, stench, crowding, impenetrable thickets and overgrown fields, but also of light and order, accompany the text. One can learn a lot from this book about the relationship of logically mathematical order and physical imagination or intuition, which is allowed to indulge in some brilliant carelessness, i.e., one can learn about the "complementarity of clarity and truth" (Bohr).