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ramblingravioli's review against another edition
I did not finish as I’d borrowed this audiobook from the library and didn’t finish it in time. I found the descriptions in each chapter wonderful, but I didn’t have the energy to keep up with the pace of the narration. I’ll hopefully come back to this book when I have more capacity:)
heleli's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
5.0
motherofladybirds's review against another edition
4.0
I enjoyed the structure of this book heading backwards through time and learnt a lot of from it. The idea that Earth has recovered from massive change and created new ecosystems was oddly hopeful. Perhaps we can earn our way to surviving the huge global changes we are facing.
annabelleclawson's review against another edition
5.0
4.5 - Really well done. The prose was gorgeous and made the very distant past come alive. This book takes on a huge project of summarizing the history of life of Earth, going back hundreds of millions (!) of years. Reading it put my life (and human life) into perspective - a smaller-than-a-speck on the Earth's timeline. I appreciated learning about the previous mass extinctions, which I didn't know much about (besides the dinosaurs obviouslyyyy).
The epilogue considered humans' impact on the environment and climate change quite well, in my opinion - not sugarcoating the gravity of what's happening but also highlighting how we can use what we know about the past to respond to the climate crisis and build a better future.
This was a great book to read over a few months, in small doses - a joy to pick up each time, but I needed a while to digest it all. I would've appreciated more illustrations because many of the animals the book describes are long extinct and I had a hard time picturing them just with the descriptions.
"A person drinking a mug of tea with a chocolate biscuit in London can be consuming atoms weathered from minerals in several continents, formed across billions of years; ions absorbed by Indian tea plants grown in a patch of Precambrian Gondwanan gneiss soil, thrown up into steep mountain slopes by the Eocene collision of continents; atoms absorbed from redistributed glacial loam by wheat, since ground into flour as if recapitulating the action of Pleistocene glaciers, and Ivorian cacao, grown in fertilizer made from Paleocene phosphate deposits on endlessly recycled rainforest soils, in turn derived from the ancient basement granites, quartzes and schists of the geological heart of West Africa that even at the time of the Chengjiang biota had been lying beneath the ground for perhaps 3 billion years."
The epilogue considered humans' impact on the environment and climate change quite well, in my opinion - not sugarcoating the gravity of what's happening but also highlighting how we can use what we know about the past to respond to the climate crisis and build a better future.
This was a great book to read over a few months, in small doses - a joy to pick up each time, but I needed a while to digest it all. I would've appreciated more illustrations because many of the animals the book describes are long extinct and I had a hard time picturing them just with the descriptions.
"A person drinking a mug of tea with a chocolate biscuit in London can be consuming atoms weathered from minerals in several continents, formed across billions of years; ions absorbed by Indian tea plants grown in a patch of Precambrian Gondwanan gneiss soil, thrown up into steep mountain slopes by the Eocene collision of continents; atoms absorbed from redistributed glacial loam by wheat, since ground into flour as if recapitulating the action of Pleistocene glaciers, and Ivorian cacao, grown in fertilizer made from Paleocene phosphate deposits on endlessly recycled rainforest soils, in turn derived from the ancient basement granites, quartzes and schists of the geological heart of West Africa that even at the time of the Chengjiang biota had been lying beneath the ground for perhaps 3 billion years."
amethystd28d4's review against another edition
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
5.0
spav's review against another edition
3.0
It kicked out really well. The descriptions given and the animals and specimens used in those descriptions really “took me there”…but as the book progressed and, in its narrative, backwards in time, the descriptions started to get too detailed or blurred and took me away from imagining those landscapes far in time.