Charles Dexter Ward

Timely Take-Aways for Life-Long Learning

Several new works of nonfiction explore the long history of planet Earth including the relatively recent impact of humans and other animals. Each provides a unique perspective and context for investigation.

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A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth
Henry Gee, Nov 2021, St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of Macmillan
Themes: Natural history, Life science, Evolution

A (VERY) SHORT HISTORY OF LIFE ON EARTH provides a quick overview of how life evolved on Earth in a dozen short chapters. The first seven chapters explore early life, to dinosaurs leaving five chapters for mammals, primates and human evolution.
Take-aways: This primer on evolution would be of particular interest to science students and teachers seeking an engaging work of nonfiction for leisure reading.… (mais)

I did learn about evolution and the fossil record and blah blah. So I guess the book did its job; I'm glad I read it. Only the language was weirdly inaccessible considering Gee is a journalist. He sounds like an academic trying to write for the pleebs but not quite getting it. A lot of his sentences are long and weirdly constructed. I had to read a whole bunch of sentences a few times over to try and figure out what he was trying to say. His humour took away from his message, for me. The book could have ended about halfway though. I liked the beginning, about our incredibly sparse fossil record and why phrases like "the missing link" need to be removed from our journalistic lexicon. But then he goes on for a while about how we can't make assumptions about how we evolved certain traits like standing erect but then continues on about how we may have evolved certain traits like standing erect. I liked the bit too where he talked about all the ways that humans are similar to other animals - our evolution wasn't strange or better, just different - but that could have been cut down a whole lot.

If you already like his writing, read it. If you want to learn some about how humans aren't at the top of the evolutionary ladder, read it. But you can probably put it down after the first few chapters.… (mais)