Goodbye Cruel World

from Scotese.com - an awesome source of paleomaps from earth history

The Great Extinctions by Norman MacLeod
Buffalo, N.Y. : Firefly Books, 2013
208 p. : ill. (chiefly col.), col. maps ; 26 cm.

Confession: I love books about deep time, especially about the earth.  This is a book that satisfied my hankering for science books about the very, very distant past.  And regarding the deep past, what could be more interesting than those rare great extinctions in which enough conditions - sea levels, climate, extraterrestrial impact, volcanism - occurred together that a dramatic percentage of all life on earth was wiped out?  The topic is even more compelling when one thinks about the possibility that we are living at the start of the 6th great extinction event.  However, I'd have to give this book a mixed - though mostly positive - review.

The strengths of this book are it's organization - each great extinction event is presented chronologically and maps, charts, and knowns and unknowns about the event are presented in much the same order.  I also really appreciated the number of illustations and maps in the book.  The author is able to cover a lot of territory in the book and make a lot of it accessible.  A lot, but not all of it - and that is my main critique of this book for a high school collection.  There are times where the data and explanations are very complex and difficult to follow and will turn off and frustrate the general reader.  Therefore I would recommend this book to students researching the science of the great extinctions or students who are avid science readers; the general reader is probably going to get bogged down long before finishing this book.

Awesome Science, Awesome Earth

From the European Space Agency

The Story of Earth: the first 4.5 billion years, from stardust to living planet by Robert Hazen
New York, N.Y. : Penguin Books, 2013.
306 p. : ill. ; 21 cm. 

I love a good science book, and this one did not disappoint.  As Nancy Curtis of Library Journal writes, "Hazen has a gift for explaining science in lay terms."  He is able to convey a lot of rather intricate and tricky scientific knowledge and concepts about the formation of the earth and its features, but in ways that get the reader to visualize and contemplate the vast changes that our planet has undergone.  His book helps explain the way in which earth's familiar geology is intricately tied up with the existence of life - in other words, without life, the earth would be a very different place geologically. Specifically, Hazen posits that most of the minerals found on earth would not exist without the chemical changes in the land, oceans, and atmosphere that life sets in motion.

For me the most exciting part of reading The Story of Earth is how it provokes thinking and imagining the nearly incomprehensible stretches of time that make up both earth's history (that 4.5 billion years) and its future (about another 4 billion years).  I think I must be like most humans and feel that a lifetime of 75-100 years is a long time, or that ancient  history (human, that is!) 2,000-3,000 years in past is immense.  But the extent of deep time really is breathtaking - the thought that life was present by the 1 billionth year of earth's existence and yet carried on for another billion year before getting the knack of photosynthesis is really incredible. Of course it was the recognition of deep time that helped Darwin see the potential for truly radical changes of organisms - given only minute changes at any one time.

I will definitely be recommending this book for any students looking for a good science read.