Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26047 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 520 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Earth: An Intimate History is prize-winning science writer Richard Fortey's latest book and an ambitious attempt to tell the geological story of planet Earth for the general reader. Several centuries and the combined efforts of thousands of professional geologists have been required to make any real sense of the Earth's structure and its 4.5 billion-year history. That Fortey manages to turn the most important aspects of all this into an enjoyable narrative for the general reader is a considerable achievement.

The book is a sort of guided tour around a number of geological sites with which Fortey is personally familiar, such as the Grand Canyon, the European Alps and Vesuvius (the description of the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii in AD 79 by Pliny the Younger is probably the first clear and objective description of a geological phenomenon.) He then uses their particular geological details to build a more general story of the geology of earth as it is generally understood today.

As a professional geologist at London's Natural History Museum, Fortey is well-qualified to tell this story. His writing skills have been widely acclaimed in earlier books such as Life: An Unauthorised Biography and Trilobite Eyewitness to Evolution. By giving the story a historical slant we can more readily understand how the present understanding of the earth story has been built up over the centuries and it introduces real people into the narrative. Consequently, the more technical aspects of present day earth science are rendered more palatable and understandable. The text is supported by a number of black and white diagrams and other pictures, which help illustrate some of the more complex processes and features of the earth. --Douglas Palmer.

Sunday Times
'it provides a grandly unifying and intellectually satisfying theory of almost everything geological, and Fortey does it full justice'

Telegraph
'...a thoroughly engrossing biography of the earth…it is as though we’re leafing through the psychiatric case history of our world...'

Customer Reviews

This book's a bore if you prefer science
Looking forward to reading a well received book on a fantastic subject matter, I was left struugling to find the will to live after page after page of tedious digression into irrelevant nonsense. Richard Fortey is clearly well read, well travelled and cultured but his digressions are only vaguely relevant. I can only think he might be a bit insecure and wants to bragg about how much he knows about stuff. Buy this if you are the guy who ends up listening to the monotonous nerd at parties, otherwise walk away. It is hard work.

A lost opportunity......., but great for insomnia
There is no doubt that Richard Fortey is an expert in his field, with a genuine wish to convey his enthusiasm for geology to a wider audience. There is one major obstacle: his writing style is prolix and turgid (sorry, Fortey has got to me: I mean long-winded and boring). I gave up at page 61 after a discussion of the structure of basalt. I can only imagine that the HarperCollins editors were completely anaesthetised by the preceding pages to let this through. Any decent PhD supervisor would have put a blue pencil through this section and written "re-write!!" in the margin. Unnecessary and unexplained phrases abound. For example, on page 58 "Tiltometers .... monitor the heave on the ground .... to an accuracy of a tenth of a microradian. That is a very small tilt indeed." Radians are not defined by Fortey, but this is easily translated: 360º = 2pi radians, so 0.1 microradians is 5.7 microdegrees. But this doesn't mean anything either in practical terms, so why not just say "Tiltometers ... monitor the minutest heaves on the ground." One can't help feeling that Fortey sees himself in the role of High Priest explaining arcane mysteries. To my mind, that is out of touch with the times.

Worth the effort
The compass of this book staggered my imagination. Not a breezy book and certainly not one to course through in a sitting. The places he chooses for geological description are diverse and representative of the complex processes shaping the surface of the earth. The material is not superficial, not at all "dumbed down." Ponderous? Restructing one's view of the cosmos ... if just only the idea of earth time ... perhaps not easily digestible. The author's comprehensive synthesis (and I did not say 'simplification')in his descriptions and historical overview of the growth of knowledge and some understanding of the various macro geological processes is enviable and refreshing at least. His language, I found, lubricates the reading process for a non-specialist like me.