Nonfiction Book Reviews

Earth: The Biography by Iain Stewart and John Lynch was intellectually stimulating.  I know that sounds boring, but just stick with me here.

I had it sitting on my bookshelf for forever (I won’t tell you how long because my boss at work reads this blog sometimes, but believe me, it was a while) and I decided that I was going to clear off all of the books on that shelf that have been there too long.  A clean start with the New Years, and all that.

Boy am I glad I did.  I love it when I read a book, and walk away having a better understanding of how the universe as a whole works.  I knew, in a fuzzy sort of way, that nature is intricately intertwined, and that the world is one giant balancing act, but I don’t think I truly understood it until I read this book.

I think the best part of this book is how it makes the connections between various sciences.  It isn’t just about space, or the beginning of life, or the ocean, or volcanoes, or hurricanes, it’s about all of this and more.  It’s like the joke we’ve all heard a million times, about the blind men who were each trying to describe an elephant, but were only describing the part that they themselves could feel.  Although each blind man was technically getting it right, it’s only when you combine the trunk with the tail, ears, legs, and body that you actually know what an elephant looks like.

I feel like I’ve been learning about each individual part of this world, without being able to “see the big picture.”  Earth: The Biography has shown me the big picture.

This book becomes a grand slam when you add in the beautiful pictures and great writing style.  I was never bored nor lost even once while reading, which you have to admit is quite the feat, considering I am not a geologist (nor do I play one on TV).

Here’s a quotation I loved:

In his book Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, the esteemed American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould offered perhaps the most resonant of metaphors, compressing 4.5 billion years of planetary history into a 24-hour day.  Our planet’s birth takes place on the stroke after midnight, and the “Cambrian explosion” - in which complex animals first start crawling about - doesn’t happen until 10 p.m. 

Dinosaurs don’t show up until after 11 p.m. and are snuffed out 20 minutes before midnight, while modern humans arrive on the scene in the last two seconds of the day.  Human civilization - some 6,000 years of empire, art, religion, and politics - is squeezed into the last tenth of a second.

Talk about mind-boggling.

Earth almost makes me wish we could really go hog wild and actually get cable television, so I could watch the National Geographic channel.  I think I’d really like it.  Unfortunately, I can just see me spending lots of time watching junk instead, so we’d better not.  I am a reader, through and through, so perhaps I wouldn’t get as much out of the National Geographic channel as I do the books anyway.

Earth: The Biography wins the rare 5 out of 5 stars rating from me.

Hava