Life an unauthorised biography

  • A magisterial exploration of the natural history of the first four thousand million years of life on and in the earth, by one of Britain's most dazzling.
  • A magisterial exploration of the natural history of the first four thousand million years of life on and in the earth, by one of Britain's most dazzling science writers.
  • Life: An Unauthorised Biography.

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    Life – An Unauthorised Biography A Natural History of the First Four Thousand Million Years of Life on Earth

    "This is not a book for people who like science books. It is a book for people who love books, and life! [Fortey] has written a wonderful book."
    – Tim Radford, Guardian

    "Read this book because it is, indeed, the best natural history of the first four billion years of life on earth."
    – John Gribbin, Sunday Times

    "Fortey writes beautifully and this is a wonderful biography of rock and life! He has restored palaeontology to its rightful place in the pantheon."
    –Lewis Wolpert, Observer

    "Richard Fortey is a scientist! but his big, rich history of four billion years of evolution is written with an artist's zest for life and language! In his last chapter Fortey quotes Goethe: "Zum Erstaunen bin ich da – I am here to wonder." Richard Fortey has the rare gift of making his readers share that wonder.

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    Life: An Unauthorised Biography

    May 17,
    Like Richard Fortey, one of my own first experiences of the full biography of life on Earth was Disney’s animation of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, in the film Fantasia. This book is a more accurate and complete version of the same. At the time he wrote this, Fortey was a senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, and a frequent BBC guest. inom had previously read his Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind (US title), and enjoyed it enough to seek out this earlier and more foundational book.

    More than the story told by paleontology, this book is also the story of paleontology, with Fortey relating his personal experiences and perspectives on various episodes in the history of the field. Chapters are arranged chronologically, starting with the inception of life on Earth fyra billion years ago, moving through his own specialization during and around the Ordovician Pe

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    Life: An Unauthorised Biography : a Natural History of the First Four Thousand Million Years of Life on Earth

    A magisterial exploration of the natural history of the first four thousand million years of life on and in the earth, by one of Britain's most dazzling science writers.



    What do any of us know about the history of our planet before the arrival of man? Most of us have a dim impression of a swirling mass of dust solidifying to form a volcanic globe, briefly populated by dinosaurs, then by woolly mammoths and finally by our own hairy ancestors. This book, aimed at the curious and intelligent but perhaps mildly uninformed reader, brilliantly dispels such lingering notions forever. At the end of the book we understand the complexity of the history of life on earth, and the complexity of how it has come to be understood, as, perhaps, from no other single volume. The result is enthralling.

  • life an unauthorised biography