| View Larger Image | Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth | Paperbackby Richard Fortey (Author)
| List Price: | $17.00 | | Price: | $11.56 | | You Save: | $5.44 (32%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Vintage | | Page Count: | 400 Pages | | Publication Date: | September 07, 1999 | | Sales Rank: | 183,961rd |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780375702617
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
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 GlobeFrom 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 |
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 |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 48 reviews)
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Lively account of life as read from stones by Book Worm (Harare, Zimbabwe)  3 Stars
January 20, 2009
I enjoy reading books on a subject from an "unexpected" perspective. A geologist writing about life (as observed in fossils) is a fascinating perspective. Most of the book was indeed very interesting, and I learned many new things and I had to "relearn" a few others and even "unlearn" what I thought was correct.
The author's straying into personal accounts of expeditions is sometimes funny, sometimes a bit irritating and lengthy. His account of searching for fossils in Spitsbergen was even amusing.
However, the book suffers from three major flaws, one seemingly small, the other affects "non native English speakers" like myself, and the third is a serious omission in presentation:
A subject covering earth's and life's history that does not have a tabular presentation of those periods simply should not be on shelves.
The literary ambitions of the author make him chose a language which seems a bit overdone at times for the subject (without, in my view, making the author a Booker or Pulitzer Award nominee). Less would have been more.
The images in the pocket book edition are practically useless, thanks to a very poor printing, no details, and very little information.
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An entertaining pop science book by Yury (Brooklyn, NY United States)  4 Stars
January 19, 2009
This book is exactly what the subtitle says it is: a history of the first four billion years of life on Earth. This is an ambitious plan, but the author carries it out with aplomb. The book starts with the first self-replicating molecules and breezes through to the evolution of Homo Sapiens in a lively style that was no less gripping that a good thriller novel. The focus is on the evolution of new life forms and on the driving forces behind the constant change of the Earth's living population. This narration is interspersed with anecdotes and snippets from the lives of scientists who were crucial in puzzling out the natural history that is the star of the book. These glimpses into the investigative process itself makes the story more lively and accessible. A minor drawback of this book is that, even though it is meant for the general non-scientist reader, at least a high-school level knowledge of biology and chemistry is required to follow the story. This is, of course, to be expected, given the huge scope and a small size of the book, it it might be confusing to someone who starts on it without the needed "pre-requisites".
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A Fine Introduction to Natural History by Kevin Conway (Cleveland, Ohio)  5 Stars
August 21, 2008
This book has just been reprinted (2008) in an illustrated edition by the prestigious Folio Society of Great Britain; so if you want to see what many early life forms actually looked like as you read Fortey's compelling prose, you should look for that version. Take note that since this book was first published several years ago, gently used hardcover editions may be a better bargain than the cheapest paperback! (This is hardly unique, either!)
A few sticklers and curmudgeons have given this great book two stars because there are a few anecdotes dispersed throughout the work, but even they admit that the other 95% of the book is a well written introduction to the emerging, ongoing saga of life on earth. This book is written in the manner of a lecture at a university, in which the professor engages and entertains the students, spicing the "meat" with some flavor to maintain their attention. It works exactly as intended. Even the misanthropes mentioned above admit that the anecdotes are often humorous, but they like to believe that people will read a science book made of nothing but soggy sawdust! Thanks anyway, I'll take it this way.
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Good Book - Not Excellent by William J. Romanos (Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, USA) 4 Stars
July 31, 2008
I was hoping for a book solely on paleontology. This book, however, also includes much autobiographical and other digressions. It is as if two books were stitched together. One containing autobiographical and other digressions on the study of paleontology and the other an overview of the natural history of the Earth. Perhaps it started out as one book and the publisher or author decided to add a different slant or perhaps this was the original intention, but not executed overly well.
Having said the foregoing, Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth, is still a good read and worth it. It is a good solid book. I would read it again. But if you are looking for an excellent introduction to paleontology or natural history, perhaps there are other books. If you are interested in some personal stories (and some of the personalities and controversies) involved in paleontology, this book is for you. It is a good book and well worth reading.
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Okay overview by A. Rehm (Boston) 4 Stars
July 01, 2008
It's okay, but Fortey's trying awfully hard with the writing, and there's a few more Milton quotes and stuff than I really need. And he spends like 100 page talking about trilobites, and many fewer pages talking about dinosaurs and giant rhinos. I dig giant rhinos, dammit! It has grown on me a bit since I finished it, but I wouldn't call it indispensable.
Update: no seriously, it's really grown on me. It's still a four-star book, but a year after reading it I'm surprised at how useful the stuff I learned from it has been.
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SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution
by Richard Fortey (Author)
With Trilobite, Richard Fortey, paleontologist and author of the acclaimed Life, offers a marvelously written, smart and compelling, accessible and witty scientific narrative of the most ubiquitous of fossil creatures.
Trilobites were shelled animals that lived in the oceans over five hundred million years ago. As bewilderingly diverse then as the beetle is today, they survived in the arctic or the tropics, were spiky or smooth, were large as lobsters or small as fleas. And because they...
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| Earth: An Intimate History
by Richard Fortey (Author)
In Earth, the acclaimed author of Trilobite! and Life takes us on a grand tour of the earth’s physical past, showing how the history of plate tectonics is etched in the landscape around us.
Beginning with Mt. Vesuvius, whose eruption in Roman times helped spark the science of geology, and ending in a lab in the West of England where mathematical models and lab experiments replace direct observation, Richard Fortey tells us what the present says about ancient geologic processes. He...
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| Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum
by Richard Fortey (Author)
Richard Fortey—one of the world’s most gifted natural scientists and acclaimed author of Life, Trilobite and Earth—describes this splendid new book as a museum of the mind. But it is, as well, a perfect behind-the-scenes guide to a legendary place. Within its pages, London’s Natural History Museum, a home of treasures—plants from the voyage of Captain Cook, barnacles to which Charles Darwin devoted years of study, hidden accursed jewels—pulses with life and miraculous surprises. In...
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| Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
by Stephen Jay Gould (Author)
"Luminous. . .Filled with profound and upsetting ideas like the Burgess Shale itself and just as solid. It is surely one of nature's best stories, told with a light touce by a master of the field."--Lewis Thomas, M.D.
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| Fossils: The History of Life
by Richard Fortey (Author)
This updated edition of the highly successful volume, created in conjunction with London’s Natural History Museum, has all the strengths of the original…and more. Completely redesigned and revised, it now features two fascinating new sections that reflect the contemporary state of the field: “How to Recognize Fossils” and “Molecular Paleontology.” Readers will find this a straightforward, fascinating, and highly attractive introduction to fossils,...
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