"With authority, humor, and detail, Gee, a paleontologist and senior editor of Nature, traces the progression of life on earth from its initial stirrings...readers will find this eye-opening book compelling for years to come."
—Booklist (starred)
"A lively, lyrical history."
—Nature
"Gee finds beauty in adversity in this eloquent account of how life evolved on Earth....Action-packed and full of facts, this well-told tale will delight lay readers."
—Publishers Weekly
"Readers should be chastened at his conclusion, shared by most scientists, that Homo sapiens is making its habitat—the Earth—progressively less habitable and will become extinct in a few thousand years. Gee writes lucid, accessible prose."
—Kirkus
"A dazzling, beguiling story told at an exhilarating pace...[a] hugely enjoyable page turner."
—Literary Review
"[Gee] plunges us back in time but also casts us back to a juvenile state of wonder. If you're prone to fleeting moments in the midst of daily tasks in which you stop to question how all this precious life came to be, the answers can be found conveniently packed within these pages."
—Geographical
"Henry Gee’s whistle-stop account of the story of life (and death — lots of death) on Earth is both fun and informative. Even better, it goes beyond the natural human inclination to see ourselves as special and puts us in our proper place in the cosmic scheme of things."
—John Gribbin, author of The Scientists and In Search of Schrodinger's Cat
"This is now the best book available about the huge changes in our planet and its living creatures, over the billions of years of the Earth’s existence. Continents have merged and broken up; massive volcanic eruptions have repeatedly reset the clock of evolution; temperatures, atmospheric gases, and sea levels have undergone big swings; and new ways of life have evolved. Henry Gee makes this kaleidoscopically changing canvas of life understandable and exciting. Who will enjoy reading this book? Everybody!"
—Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Upheaval
"Don’t miss this delightful, concise, sweeping masterpiece! Gee brilliantly condenses the entire, improbable, astonishing history of life on earth—all 5 billion years—into a charming, zippy and scientifically accurate yarn. I honestly couldn’t put this book down, and you won’t either."
—Daniel E. Lieberman, Edwin M. Lerner II professor of Biological Sciences, Harvard University and author of Exercised
"A scintillating, fast-paced waltz through four billion years of evolution, from one of our leading science writers. As a senior editor at Nature, Henry Gee has had a front-row seat to the most important fossil discoveries of the last quarter century. His poetic prose animates the history of life, from the first bacteria to trilobites to dinosaurs to us."
—Steve Brusatte, paleontologist, University of Edinburgh and New York Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
06/01/2021
Podcast cohosts Cham, a scientist-turned-cartoonist (PHD Comics), and University of California, Irvine, professor Whiteson address Frequently Asked Questions About the Universe, from space and time to gravity, black holes, and the origins of everything. Winner of Lowell Thomas and Western Press Association honors, Fox blends memories of growing up on a remote Maine island and an explanation of how and why we are facing The Last Winter, with snow cover and the length of the snowy season shrinking precipitously in the last 50 years (35,000-copy first printing). Senior editor at Nature, Gee takes us back to Earth's roiling early seas as the bubbles that became life began forming, that strides us through A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth (60,000-copy first printing). Professor of medicine in the University of Michigan's Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care, Han gives us Breathing Lessons, explaining how the lungs work as she highlights their role as the body's first line of defense. Uganda's first Fridays for Future protestor and a leading climate justice crusader, Nakate blends proclamation and the personal in A Bigger Picture, arguing that while her community suffers disproportionately from climate change, activists from Africa and the global south are often not heard in the din of white voices. As one of five international delegates at the World Economic Forum, she was even cropped from an AP photo (40,000-copy first printing).
2021-08-28
The title tells it all.
Nature senior editor Gee spends only two pages on the beginning of Earth, when a cloud of dust circling the sun coalesced into a planet about 4.6 billion years ago. The infant Earth was molten rock that eventually cooled enough for atmospheric water to condense into oceans, and it’s amazing, as the author rightly notes, how quickly it appeared—perhaps 100 million years after the planet formed. Early Earth lacked oxygen, so there was no ozone layer in the upper atmosphere to block the sun’s ultraviolet rays, which sterilized everything above the surface of the sea. Consequently, primitive bacteria lived deep in the ocean for at least 1 billion years until some evolved pigments that absorbed these rays to produce sugar. This was photosynthesis. Its fiercely reactive waste product, oxygen, produced the first mass extinction of life that had evolved in its absence. As Gee relates, it was another several billion years before primitive bacteria (prokaryotes) evolved into advanced bacteria (eukaryotes), which accelerated evolution, forming multicellular life forms by 800 million years ago as well as the first animals—sponges. Life moved onto land 500 million years ago and broke its dependence on the sea not through legs (some fish have legs) but with hard-shelled eggs and seeds. Racing through dinosaurs and mammals, Gee introduce apes less than two-thirds into the text and hominins a few pages later. Readers should be chastened at his conclusion, shared by most scientists, that Homo sapiens is making its habitat—the Earth—progressively less habitable and will become extinct in a few thousand years. For a primer on evolution, readers might prefer Andrew Knoll’s A Brief History of Earth (2021) for one reason: illustrations. Gee writes lucid, accessible prose, but readers of his thorough descriptions of long-extinct creatures or explanations of how body parts evolved will yearn in vain for pictures.
A serviceable history of life that one wishes were more comprehensive.