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silvercloudedskies 's review for:
A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters
by Andrew H. Knoll
after chapter one, i questioned why knoll was telling me incredibly basic information. i assumed he would go more in-depth. at chapter three, i had an uncharacteristically lucid moment where i saw something from the perspective of another person - a layman, if you will; i use the term kindly and i do not mean to be demeaning.
let’s rewind a bit: i study science - i have loved science from age three, when i carted around dinosaur flashcards and learned how to read so i could read about dinosaurs in an encyclopedia i still own. i have grown up teaching myself everything i can about topics i love - deep time, paleontology, zoology, oceanography - and all that time gaining an awareness of the richness of earth; an appreciation for the sheer amount of time and change and life and death it’s taken for everything my eyes can and cannot see to come to fruition. to me, the words “ordovician period” and “australopithecenes” recall specific imagery and knowledge. millions and billions of years have meaning. but, i realized sometime during chapter three’s recap of organic compounds, this isn’t the case for everyone. this book isn’t, in fact, common knowledge - many people can learn something from it.
that being said, i recommend this to anyone who doesn’t interact with science more than once a month or who has never heard of deep time. while the words on these pages aren’t common knowledge, they should be - this history is almost indescribably important and knoll does an incredible job of distilling that rich, impossibly nuanced history to its most important pieces and writing in an accessible voice that feels more like a conversation than a lecture. i give it three stars, but someone who doesn’t possess the knowledge contained within might easily give it five. for folks like me, though, i think this is a skip - i did not learn anything new from this book. in fact, in my ideal world, nobody would. we would all know already the vastness of the planet we inhabit and the time taken to accumulate the so-called riches that we so greedily plunder and the feeling of being just a minuscule speck on some great timeline.
let’s rewind a bit: i study science - i have loved science from age three, when i carted around dinosaur flashcards and learned how to read so i could read about dinosaurs in an encyclopedia i still own. i have grown up teaching myself everything i can about topics i love - deep time, paleontology, zoology, oceanography - and all that time gaining an awareness of the richness of earth; an appreciation for the sheer amount of time and change and life and death it’s taken for everything my eyes can and cannot see to come to fruition. to me, the words “ordovician period” and “australopithecenes” recall specific imagery and knowledge. millions and billions of years have meaning. but, i realized sometime during chapter three’s recap of organic compounds, this isn’t the case for everyone. this book isn’t, in fact, common knowledge - many people can learn something from it.
that being said, i recommend this to anyone who doesn’t interact with science more than once a month or who has never heard of deep time. while the words on these pages aren’t common knowledge, they should be - this history is almost indescribably important and knoll does an incredible job of distilling that rich, impossibly nuanced history to its most important pieces and writing in an accessible voice that feels more like a conversation than a lecture. i give it three stars, but someone who doesn’t possess the knowledge contained within might easily give it five. for folks like me, though, i think this is a skip - i did not learn anything new from this book. in fact, in my ideal world, nobody would. we would all know already the vastness of the planet we inhabit and the time taken to accumulate the so-called riches that we so greedily plunder and the feeling of being just a minuscule speck on some great timeline.