Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth [Hardcover]

Marcia Bjornerud (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 081334249X | ISBN-13: 978-0813342498 | Publication Date: April 26, 2005 | Edition: Paperback ed.

To many of us, the Earth’s crust is a relic of ancient, unknowable history. But to a geologist, stones are richly illustrated narratives, telling gothic tales of cataclysm and reincarnation. For more than four billion years, in beach sand, granite, and garnet schists, the planet has kept a rich and idiosyncratic journal of its past.Fulbright Scholar Marcia Bjornerud takes the reader along on an eye-opening tour of Deep Time, explaining in elegant prose what we see and feel beneath our feet. Both scientist and storyteller, Bjornerud uses anecdotes and metaphors to remind us that our home is a living thing with lessons to teach.She shows how our planet has long maintained a delicate balance, and how the global give-and-take has sustained life on Earth through numerous upheavals. But with the rapidly escalating effects of human beings on their home planet, that cosmic balance is being threatened—and the consequences may be catastrophic.Containing a glossary and detailed timescale, as well as vivid descriptions and historic accounts, Reading the Rocks is literally a history of the world, for all friends of the Earth.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this engrossing volume of pop-geology, geologist Bjornerud chronicles the watersheds in Earth's history from the primordial supernova that seeded the nascent solar nebula to the man-made cataclysms of global warming and habitat destruction, visiting along the way such "near-death experiences" as the Moon's apparent birth from a collision between Earth and a wandering planet, the "Snowball Earth" period when the oceans froze over, and the asphyxiating "Permian-Triassic oxygen crisis," when 90% of the world's species died out in less than a million years. Adopting something of a Gaian perspective of Earth as a self-regulating superorganism, the author attributes the planet's stability in the face of upheaval to dynamic mechanisms that cycle elements back and forth among the atmosphere, the oceans, the biosphere and Earth's crust and interior. Bjornerud conveys these lessons through a stimulating introduction to the geological principles by which Earth's past is teased out of obscure but telling details of rocks and fossils. Her thematically structured chapters, reminiscent of Stephen Jay Gould's essays, are written in an expansive, erudite style ranging from science to philosophy, history and the occasional admonition against humanity's reckless remaking of the environment "like spoiled children." (May)
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From Booklist

College professor Bjornerud presents an evocative history of the earth, one that will instill an appreciation for the dynamism and comparative uniqueness of our planet. Geology's specialties of crystallography, geochronology, and other techniques can find the clues that rocks embody in their passage through fire and ice. Often employing anthropic metaphors about a rock's "memory" of its pat, Bjornerud dispenses with lecturing and departs on an elliptical (through still precise) presentation. The reader isn't directed to the attributes of a rock but, rather, to the geological cycles by which, and the environments in which, it was created. Interconnecting in Bjornerud's account, cycles such as tectonics and weathering have had their "settings" altered over time, affecting in turn the rocks whose content of minerals, radioactivity, and fossils are the basis for the cathartic demarcations of the geologic time scale. An exemplary introduction, Bjornerud's work displays a fluidity, clarity, and awe that will inspire further reading. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; Paperback ed. edition (April 26, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081334249X
• ISBN-13: 978-0813342498
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #940,054 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This whispering in the rocks, October 20, 2005

By 

Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth (Hardcover)

There are many messages in Nature deserving our attention. Animal calls and howling winds are the most obvious. Their raucous cries often deafen us to the more subtle message lying out of sight. Those other voices are buried in the rocks under our feet. Marcia Bjornerud has listened to those murmurings of the Earth. She shares what she's heard in this fine introduction to geology. There's meaning in what the rocks have to say and she begs us to listen closely. The messages are often subtle, requiring some attention to understand them.

Bjornerud is candid about her feelings. Rocks, she writes, are her "obsession". She not only wishes to share that obsession, she wants us to understand it. Perhaps, if we are encouraged a bit, we might partake of it. To keep the tone of the book conversational, instead of academic, she provides flighty titles for her chapters and topic headings. From "The Tao of the Earth" to open the narrative, she moves to "Stars of Rock and Heavy Metal" and "Communes and Junkyards". It's a good method to entice the reader to delve into the text for explanations.

The explanations are provided in clear, readable text. Her "Primer of Reading Rocks" offers a summary history of the science of geology, from James Hutton onward. She explains why it's essential to learn about sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic rock. If you're looking for fossils for the kids' collection, don't poke around in the glitter of igneous upheavals. Fossils won't be there. However, he dull, greyish brown layers that seem so boring may yield family treasures. To keep things organised, the author provides the geologic ages as a memory aid. She adequately explains the rock dating processes and what they mean as analysis tools. Other measurement tools have more immediate import, however. One index of rising importance is the flow and take-up of groundwater. With water resources being depleted on a global scale, understanding how the rocks retain water or permit its flow is of strategic importance. In her chapter "Mixing and Sorting", Bjornerud emphasizes the limitations of available useful water.

Bjornerud accomplishes a great deal with this book. She provides a wealth of information packed into a small volume. While her topic headings may seem almost giddy to academic scientists, the explanatory material is firm and explicit. She bases her information on worthy sources, with good footnotes. She goes beyond mere geology, explaining how life has evolved and how climate has impacted its progress. If there is a lack in this book, it lies in the lack of photographs or line drawings of the material she covers. A "popular" book of geology and rocks deserves more than good text description. If Bjornerud wants more people to take an interest in the rocks she's obsessed with, we need to have examples of what those lithics look like. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In the Author's Words, September 27, 2005

By 

Curtis Long - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth (Hardcover)

Weighing in at 197 pages this is not a long book. Still, it could be hard for a civilian to wade through that many pages of rock-talk. Nonetheless, Bjornerud's humor combined with her impressive command of the English language and metaphoric use of cultural references (from literary canon through contemporary pop) result in a refreshingly fun way to learn geology. In fact, the pages fly by; I found myself (with no background in geology) devouring the book more quickly than expected and was disappointed to reach the last page and have to put it down. (I loaned it to an acquaintance thinking she might like it. She finished it in one weekend!)

Getting right to the point, I highly recommend this book.

And rather than bore you with my attempt to play the critic, allow me instead to quote a few favorite passages to illustrate my point...in the author's words:

"Predation is, of course, a brilliant strategy for survival; rather than having to gather diffuse nourishment directly from seawater (the ultimate slow food), one can quickly ingest large bites of high-quality protein that has been conveniently preprocessed by other organisms. Predation is neither good nor bad in any absolute sense, but once introduced, it utterly changes the rules of an ecosystem. Carnivores can eat (but otherwise ignore) vegetarians, but vegetarians can neither eat nor ignore carnivores."

"Species that survived for long intervals of time with little change - the most successful from an evolutionary standpoint - do not make good index fossils. Instead, the Edsels and eight-track tapes of the fossil record are the most useful, because they are diagnostic of well-defined geologic moments."

Describing the periodic table of the elements: "The snooty noble gases, in the far right column, have perfectly filled electron shells and refuse to interact with other lesser forms of matter."

"Unlike normal earthly anorthite...the anorthite in the Allende chondrite also contained measurable amounts of magnesium. To a mineralogist, this is like finding an uninvited and ill-dressed guest at a gala dinner. Normally, anorthite eschews magnesium..."

"[The periodic table of the elements] fails to inspire the awe its human users should feel at knowing that every atom of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon in our bodies is simply on short-term loan from the cosmic library; was previously issued to remote stars, rogue comets, and rocky cliffs; and will soon be returned for further circulation."

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reading the Mind of a Geologist, August 28, 2005

By 

Bruce Crocker "agnostictrickster" (Whittier, California United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth (Hardcover)

It's not easy thinking like a geologist. By that I do not mean that it is necessarily difficult to learn to think like a geologist - I did it! - but that the consequences of geologic thinking are many and varied. Your mind is trained to fathom everything from the smallest fraction of a second to the longest times imaginable and this gives you a very different perspective on things than the average person. [It's hard to get into discussions with the neighbors about earthquakes, hurricanes, or, most recently here in southern California, landslides without sounding callous and overly excited at the same time.] To a geologist, a small pebble contains a long history. Marcia Bjornerud, geologist and eloquent expositor of the earth sciences, has given non-geologists and geologists alike a gift with her wonderful book Reading The Rocks. The subtitle of the book - The Autobiography of the Earth - seems to me to be slightly misleading. Yes, if you read the entire book, you'll have a general overview of earth history [although since not presented in chronological order, you'll have to mentally assemble the bits yourself]. The main title really tells the tale - Professor Bjornerud takes us into the mind of a geologist and shows us how they think. Reading the book took me back to those heady days of college and graduate school as countless lectures and field trips began to take and I began to get it. I remember the day that I was staring at a layer of limestone in the then unfinished freeway bypass around State College, Pennsylvania and was fixated on a thin layer of sand grains that ran through the fairly thick layer of limestone. The overall layer represented hundreds, thousands, or maybe even millions of years of sediment deposition, but that 1 or 2 grain thick sand layer represented a season or maybe even a storm. [WOW, DUDE!]. She pulls no punches on the vocabulary, but a glossary at the end of the book will help the reader unfamiliar with the language of geology. If you like reading books about science and you have limited time to do it, I recommend that Reading the Rocks by Marcia Bjornerud move to the top of your pile!