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wandering_not_lost 's review for:
Otherlands: Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds
by Thomas Halliday
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Really a 4.5, but in the end even though the book had its slow points, I had to give it a 5 just because it's given me a bit of an existential crisis.
This book does not pull any academic punches. It's a serious science book, and probably requires a solid science background. And...it's about deep time. Geological time. Evolutionary time. Billions and billions of years. Numbers of years so big that my brain can't really wrap itself around the timescales we're talking about. This book forces you to think about how glaciers actually flow, about how continents move and bash into each other, and then move apart again. About how bacterial activity can change the atmosphere over long enough time periods. How the inconceivably huge number of generations of animals have led to an incomprehensible number of different creatures. It's changed my perspective on life on earth, it's safe to say.
Interestingly, the book STARTS with the more recent times and then delves backwards, as if digging down into the fossil record. At first this was hard for me to follow, as it's kind of backwards to the way we tell stories, right? But in the end I liked it for how much it DE-EMPHASIZED humanity. We're not a final product. We're one of many consequences, and life will go on around and after us.
The chapters generally focus around a particular strategy or adaptation, and talk about a particular place and time: what it looked like, what lived there, what the weather was like and how it shaped the earth. What the Earth itself looked like at the time, since very quickly the continents just wandered willy-nilly away from what you see on the modern globe. This was a very cool style for the book. Some of the chapters were more boring than others, with longer lists of names and less description, but the best of them picked a few index species and really dug into what we know about them. Along the way you also learn about the myriad of extinction events and cataclysms that the Earth has survived, which is awe-inspiring, too and several times just left me staring off into space going, "...wow."
This book needed way more pictures, though. Be prepared to go google up some of the creatures, because usually only one or so is actually pictured per chapter, which is not nearly enough.
This book does not pull any academic punches. It's a serious science book, and probably requires a solid science background. And...it's about deep time. Geological time. Evolutionary time. Billions and billions of years. Numbers of years so big that my brain can't really wrap itself around the timescales we're talking about. This book forces you to think about how glaciers actually flow, about how continents move and bash into each other, and then move apart again. About how bacterial activity can change the atmosphere over long enough time periods. How the inconceivably huge number of generations of animals have led to an incomprehensible number of different creatures. It's changed my perspective on life on earth, it's safe to say.
Interestingly, the book STARTS with the more recent times and then delves backwards, as if digging down into the fossil record. At first this was hard for me to follow, as it's kind of backwards to the way we tell stories, right? But in the end I liked it for how much it DE-EMPHASIZED humanity. We're not a final product. We're one of many consequences, and life will go on around and after us.
The chapters generally focus around a particular strategy or adaptation, and talk about a particular place and time: what it looked like, what lived there, what the weather was like and how it shaped the earth. What the Earth itself looked like at the time, since very quickly the continents just wandered willy-nilly away from what you see on the modern globe. This was a very cool style for the book. Some of the chapters were more boring than others, with longer lists of names and less description, but the best of them picked a few index species and really dug into what we know about them. Along the way you also learn about the myriad of extinction events and cataclysms that the Earth has survived, which is awe-inspiring, too and several times just left me staring off into space going, "...wow."
This book needed way more pictures, though. Be prepared to go google up some of the creatures, because usually only one or so is actually pictured per chapter, which is not nearly enough.