Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 ...From the beginning April 9, 2008
Fortey sounds like he needed no research for this. He simply began writing what he knew and carried on. It just happenned to include 4 billion years of life!
Fortey has an engaging style, not pacy like Dawkins, but reminiscent of a wise old fox, keen to lace his own personal experiences into the story.
This can variable results. While I thoroughly enjoyed the recalling of student adventures, Fortey's first love of trilobites sees too much (IMO) time spent meandering through the Palaeozoic. This is a minor minor gripe!
A wonderful book.
 Absolutelius Superbersaurus December 4, 2007
Ok, bit of a foible of mine but i normally get wound up when authors start telling their life story in a history book but here its well judged, funny and adds to the sense of joy about his subject. Without delving too much into the minutiae of 4 billion years of life it gives you a wide ranging overview of the subject in a fantastically readable way- no long disscussions over Bivalve morphology that gave me nightmares at university!
Its not a textbook, its a beautifully crafted novella with Mr Fortey as the narrator and a cast of heroes and villains (and missunderstood villains like the oviraptor) - my second favourite book of the year (and theres been a lot this year)
So, here we are 4,000 million years later May 28, 2004
30 out of 31 found this review helpful
British paleontologist Richard Fortey has written a marvelously concise and erudite historical synopsis of terrestrial life from around 4,000 million years ago, when meteors seeded the planet with the elements, most importantly carbon, that allowed for the evolution of organic molecules, to around 25,000 years ago, when Cro-Magnon Homo sapiens founded interior decorating by painting animals on the walls of his cave living-rooms. Fortey's account necessarily leaves off with the beginning of recorded history. (Blessedly, the life forms "Benifer" and Michael Jackson fail to appear in the narrative even once.) The author hits the high points, including the evolution of single cells, the formation of bacterial colonies, the initiation of chlorophyll-based photosynthesis (that ultimately charged the atmosphere with oxygen), the specialization of cells into tissues, the population of the seas, the advance onto land, the greening of the earth, the separation of ancient Pangaea into today's separate continents, the Age of Dinosaurs, the advent of live-birth from wombs, the ascendancy of mammals, and finally the evolution of Man. For me, the most interesting chapter was on the apocalyptic cataclysm which ended the Age of Dinosaurs, i.e. the asteroid which apparently slammed into the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula creating the Chicxulub Crater. The volume also includes several photo sections that provide an adequate visual summary of the text. The time spans of Fortey's tale are almost beyond mental grasp. For instance, at one point the author states that tool making by hominids began about 2.5 million years ago. Yet the style of the tools, the "technology" if you will, then remained virtually unchanged for the next million years. After witnessing the dizzying pace of technological advancement just during the span of my own life, this stagnation for such an incomprehensible length of time is mind-boggling. I wish I had but a fraction of Fortey's knowledge of our world. LIFE should be required reading in every high school science program.
Great story October 28, 2001
20 out of 21 found this review helpful
If you want to be swept off your feet by the great story that is life on earth, this is the book to read. Fortey is a scientist with the relatively rare gift of making not only scientific facts but also the romance of science accesible to the layperson. His tone is conversational, his language clear and his style humourous. He starts off with an entertaining anecdotal chapter on how he himself became involved in paleonthology and from there jumps back some 4 billion years, to when it all began. I thoroughly enjoyed immersing myself in this book. The only criticism is that the somewhat crummy black and white photographs are rather meagre as illustrations. I would have liked more and better pictures of all the wondrous life forms that Fortey describes with so much panache. Still, in spite of this the book is worth five stars to me.
A treasure trove for the curious July 6, 1999
23 out of 23 found this review helpful
It is refreshing to read a book like this: a scientific book for the layman, but one that does not take for granted that its readers are ignorant or stupid. This is not a book for scientists or specialists, but for ordinary people, scientifically literate but only to some degree, who are curious about about the origin and evolution of Life, who ever wondered how was Earth like in the first years of its history, and in later periods, when our planet was still an alien place. This book does just that, taking us to sweltering Carboniferous forests, to oceans teeming with life and deserted land, to landscapes inhabited by strange animals, the like of which exist no more. It explains us how, step by tiny step, life changed the face of the Earth. I was not bothered by the personal references or apparent digressions; all these served as examples to illustrate different points. I was indeed bothered however by the lack of charts. For example, an chart illustrating the different geological eras would have been useful: not all of us know by heart the exact order of the geological periods, and sometimes it is easy to get lost. I ended up copying such a chart from an encyclopedia and keeping the slip of paper inside the book, for reference. It would also have been interesting to have charts (like the cladistic charts of which there are some examples), illustrating how different species are related.
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