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4.04 AVERAGE
4.04 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
medium-paced
Really wonderful history of life on earth, starting with the present and going back to the Ediacaran. Beautifully written and fascinating, concentrating on specific biomes in each period. It took a very long time to read because I read it aloud to my wife, who loved it but usually fell asleep after a few pages.
informative
slow-paced
informative
slow-paced
I have mixed feelings about this - there's so much to this that's fascinating but it runs up against my own personal limits of visualisation. It's a *very* visual book, each chapter focused on a single scene, describing the geography and geology of an area and the appearance and behaviour of a set of species. For me I just found it incredibly hard to picture much of what's being described. When mentioning an animal, I pretty much always instantly searched for a reconstruction - and almost always what I'd pictured from his description was significantly different. Especially the further back you go, things are so different! With the geography I was completely lost at sea and had to settle for accepting I was only getting broad impressions, even though often the descriptions were quite beautiful. It feels like a book written to be lavishly illustrated, full of diagrams. I finished it desperately wanting that book!
If you can accept that you're not going to get a perfect handle of the specifics and you'll be regularly looking up cool sounding animals and plants, there is a lot to fascinate you here. He really does show the past eras as alien worlds, more impressive than anything out of sci fi, yet still evoking a feeling of connectedness. Even in the pre cambrian, reading about weird primitive circles vaguely drifting through the microbial mat of the ocean floor, there's still a part of me that felt tender towards them, across 600 million years. The variety of animal life and the way it's distinctively connected to climate conditions is well illustrated. There's tons of fascinating details - one that struck me was logs being able to be floating ecosystems for decades in the Jurassic because there were no wood boring sea predators like shipworm to destroy them prematurely. The glass sponge reefs which covered 7000km of sea were incredible to me too - "at three times the length of the Great Barrier Reef, these silicon constructions are the largest biological structures ever to have existed" As with many books about the natural world, there's too much amazing stuff to keep in my head and due to my first point it was often a bit of a slog getting through it, but it definitely opened my eyes again to the sheer wonder of natural history and all the unbelievable, incredible things life has done.
It ends with an epilogue about climate change with a mild degree of hope but mostly urgency, obviously. It fits in given how much the book has talked about climate and geological changes (and occasionally the negative results of life finding a new resource) with their impacts on what life can actually exist - particularly notable of course things like the Permian extinction event. Near the end he quotes Ozymandias by Horace Smith:
"We wonder — and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place."
If you can accept that you're not going to get a perfect handle of the specifics and you'll be regularly looking up cool sounding animals and plants, there is a lot to fascinate you here. He really does show the past eras as alien worlds, more impressive than anything out of sci fi, yet still evoking a feeling of connectedness. Even in the pre cambrian, reading about weird primitive circles vaguely drifting through the microbial mat of the ocean floor, there's still a part of me that felt tender towards them, across 600 million years. The variety of animal life and the way it's distinctively connected to climate conditions is well illustrated. There's tons of fascinating details - one that struck me was logs being able to be floating ecosystems for decades in the Jurassic because there were no wood boring sea predators like shipworm to destroy them prematurely. The glass sponge reefs which covered 7000km of sea were incredible to me too - "at three times the length of the Great Barrier Reef, these silicon constructions are the largest biological structures ever to have existed" As with many books about the natural world, there's too much amazing stuff to keep in my head and due to my first point it was often a bit of a slog getting through it, but it definitely opened my eyes again to the sheer wonder of natural history and all the unbelievable, incredible things life has done.
It ends with an epilogue about climate change with a mild degree of hope but mostly urgency, obviously. It fits in given how much the book has talked about climate and geological changes (and occasionally the negative results of life finding a new resource) with their impacts on what life can actually exist - particularly notable of course things like the Permian extinction event. Near the end he quotes Ozymandias by Horace Smith:
"We wonder — and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place."
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
informative
medium-paced
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
It's a lot of words, and it jumps about chronologically which I found difficult to keep track of in a book about prehistoric earth.
informative
reflective
slow-paced