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A review by annabelleclawson
Otherlands: Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday
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."