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Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth, by Richard Fortey
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A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
"Extraordinary. . . . Anyone with the slightest interest in biology should read this book."--The New York Times Book Review
"A marvelous museum of the past four billion years on earth--capacious, jammed with treasures, full of learning and wide-eyed wonder."--The Boston Globe
From its origins on the still-forming planet to the recent emergence of Homo sapiens--one of the world's leading paleontologists offers an absorbing account of how and why life on earth developed as it did. Interlacing the tale of his own adventures in the field with vivid descriptions of creatures who emerged and disappeared in the long march of geologic time, Richard Fortey sheds light upon a fascinating array of evolutionary wonders, mysteries, and debates. Brimming with wit, literary style, and the joy of discovery, this is an indispensable book that will delight the general reader and the scientist alike.
"A drama bolder and more sweeping than Gone with the Wind . . . a pleasure to read."--Science
"A beautifully written and structured work . . . packed with lucid expositions of science."--Natural History
- Sales Rank: #125527 in Books
- Published on: 1999-09-07
- Released on: 1999-09-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .83" w x 5.20" l, .79 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 400 pages
Amazon.com Review
"The excitement of discovery cannot be bought, or faked, or learned from books," London Natural History Museum senior paleontologist Richard Fortey writes in Life. The first chapter, an engrossing account of an Arctic fossil-hunting expedition he undertook as a university student, will bring shivers to anyone who has ever ignored cold hands, hunger, and filthy socks to keep looking for something new, some piece of rock or bit of plant that may hold the key to the gleaming certainty of understanding. Fortey's descriptions of scruffy field assistants and eccentrically brilliant scientists are easily as interesting as the billions of years of evolution he so imaginatively describes. After all, the fossil record has not been accepted without controversy, and the arguments among fallible evolutionary biologists as they refined their theories make for great reading. But it is the little animals that make up our distant ancestry that are the focus here. The often mysterious fossils they left behind are like a history book in a language we don't know--the history of bugs and birds, humans and cauliflowers. One by one, Fortey reveals how the puzzles of paleontology have been subjected to the scientific method and to the politics and personal ambitions of academia, until a beautifully clear path is traced from the very first traces of life all the way across the eons to the advent of Homo sapiens. Fortey's elegantly written tour lets us share his passion for ancient seas and the animals that frolicked in them, and understand how time and chance contributed to the biography of us all. --Therese Littleton
From Library Journal
The diversity of Earth's evolutionary history are preserved in its stones. Fortney enlivens this broad paleontological survey with anecdotes from his own fossil-hunting expeditions.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Scientific American
"The narrative of life requires a scale of thousands to millions of years, acting over a drama of more than 3,000 million years." It is a grand narrative, told grandly by Fortey, a senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Drawing on a great breadth of knowledge, he flavors the narrative with illuminating and often surprising analogies and quotations from the likes of Pope, Swift and Yeats. His story takes life from the first single-celled organisms to prehistoric humans--over "the vast tract of time after the Sun blazed into heat ... and before humans started making pots, building ceremonial centres, and recording the details of their daily transactions on pottery slabs."
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
So, here we are 4,000 million years later
By Mr. Joe
British paleontologist Richard Fortey has written a marvelously concise and erudite historical synopsis of terrestrial life from around 4,000 million years ago, when meteors seeded the planet with the elements, most importantly carbon, that allowed for the evolution of organic molecules, to around 25,000 years ago, when Cro-Magnon Homo sapiens founded interior decorating by painting animals on the walls of his cave living-rooms. Fortey's account necessarily leaves off with the beginning of recorded history. (Blessedly, the life forms "Benifer" and Michael Jackson fail to appear in the narrative even once.)
The author hits the high points, including the evolution of single cells, the formation of bacterial colonies, the initiation of chlorophyll-based photosynthesis (that ultimately charged the atmosphere with oxygen), the specialization of cells into tissues, the population of the seas, the advance onto land, the greening of the earth, the separation of ancient Pangaea into today's separate continents, the Age of Dinosaurs, the advent of live-birth from wombs, the ascendancy of mammals, and finally the evolution of Man. For me, the most interesting chapter was on the apocalyptic cataclysm which ended the Age of Dinosaurs, i.e. the asteroid which apparently slammed into the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula creating the Chicxulub Crater. The volume also includes several photo sections that provide an adequate visual summary of the text.
The time spans of Fortey's tale are almost beyond mental grasp. For instance, at one point the author states that tool making by hominids began about 2.5 million years ago. Yet the style of the tools, the "technology" if you will, then remained virtually unchanged for the next million years. After witnessing the dizzying pace of technological advancement just during the span of my own life, this stagnation for such an incomprehensible length of time is mind-boggling.
I wish I had but a fraction of Fortey's knowledge of our world. LIFE should be required reading in every high school science program.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
More Interesting as Memoir Than as Science
By Bradley P. Rich
Like his more recent book Trilobyte, this book is well crafted. For the reader interested in the process of discovery by a scientist, I suspect that this book will satisfy. Sadly, I came to the book in a search for current information about the history of life on earth and was disappointed. The book drifts between stories of the author's paleontological expeditions and a discussion of theories of the history of life on earth. If the reader is actually attempting to learn what Fortey knows about that history he is left to riffle through the pages in search of information. There are some interesting discussions here, but unfortunately they are buried in chatty biography. In short, if you are interested in Richard Fortey's life, buy this book. If you are interested in life on this planet, keep looking.
50 of 71 people found the following review helpful.
light-hearted book is serious disappointment
By Peter J. Adams
This kind of book gives popular science a bad name. I believe popular science should tell you something about science, albeit in an entertaining and accessible way. While the book is entertaining for the most part, I came away feeling as if I had not learned much at all.
A much-cited criticism of the book is that the author digresses into many personal anecdotes. This is true. Many are entertaining, a few are even enlightening, but too many take up space in a book that is already too short to do justice to the topic. For example, Fortey spends two pages telling us what he thought of Thailand while he was doing fieldwork there. We discover that the food was hot enough to make his nose run, but that blowing your nose in public is taboo in Thailand. Such conflict! He hides scraps of rolled-up newspaper in his pants pocket to deal with this crisis. The climax of the story: a female lounge singer touches him on his thigh, is startled by a roll, and wonders what it might be. Being a scientist myself, reading this made me feel like I was cornered by an awkward colleague at a cocktail party and was desperately trying to avoid another self-indulgent anecdote. This is one example of many that you will have to wade through to get to some natural history.
On a happier note, Fortey does a reasonable job conjuring up images of worlds long past. He can describe the tropical jungles of the dinosaurs or more exotic landscapes well enough to give you some idea of what it would feel like. Even here, however, he often throws in a lame simile: "...where now there beats a sun that melts ice as fast as a hot frying pan melts butter". Cringe.
I did learn a few things, however. The section describing the geological evidence for a meteor that causes the extinction of the dinosaurs was a high point. If you don't already know something about what the Cambrian Explosion is (I did), you will learn that too. I suppose any book on the subject will inevitably have some sparse educational value. It is telling, however, that there is no chronological chart that lays out the many geological periods, eras, and so on that we encounter in this book. Also, many species, classes, and orders are mentioned without any definition about what sets them apart. A tree of relationships would have been nice. Evidently, Fortey is not much concerned that we learn or understand any of this.
Overall, Fortey underestimates and disappoints his audience. The book feels like it is supposed to entertain fidgety teenagers with glitz rather than inform educated adults.
[Reviewer's Background: I am an atmospheric scientist, but someone who has never taken a course in paleontology. This is the first book I have read on natural history.]
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