Customer Reviews

A Short History of Planet Earth: Mountains, Mammals, Fire, and Ice (Wiley Popular Science)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
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This book is not only a great way for the layman to get an understanding of the history of our planet, it's also a testament to the way science works. MacDougall writes clearly, avoids jargon, and doesn't hesitate to explain the reasoning behind statements about events in geological history. He doesn't leave loose ends nor does he make unsupported statements. He draws together different threads of evidence, allowing the reader to see how ideas come together to reinforce a statement about what happened millions or billions of years ago. He seems to anticipate questions a reader might ask and answers them. Far from a boring account, you could get excited not only about geology but about science in general from this book. I've read it twice and keep it on the shelf for future reference. Many drawings give clarity to the written account. There is no attempt to entertain the reader with gratuitous humor, so common in explanatory books these days. This isn't "for dummies" or "an idiot's guide." Instead, your intelligence, curiosity and scepticism are assumed. It isn't easy for creatures who live less than 100 years to grasp events that occur over millions of years but I found this book allowed me to conceptualize the earth's 4.5 billion year story in a very satisfying way.

Ok - as a geologist myself, I love to read books on geology even if they cover a lot of material I already know. But this book surprised me in being very thorough on earth history including many very recent scientific discoveries and developments that I have only seen in scientific journals. He does a very nice job of covering the breath of earth history without being overly technical for the lay person, but yet engrossing enough for the professional geologist. Hey even we cannot know everything in the geology world - thus the reason I read this.

MacDougall does a good job of providing the reader with both the rock history but also the history of life on earth, from the earliest bacterial forms through the amazing trilobites, dinosaurs and trees and grasses and such. He also does a good job of relating many of the geologic features around the US and the world to plate tectonics and the interplay of the environment that produces the rocks and features we see today

For those budding young rock hounds or the adult wanting to brush up on an area that you could use more info on, or perhaps a geologist who wants to brush up on their earth history, I whole-heartedly recommend this book.

My title above pretty much says it all! There is a good flow to the way one paragraph flows into another. I am a layman with an interest in the integrated "big systems" of science--how processes studied by several disciplines come together and attempt to explain how our planet works. This book does that to the point I may want to go on to more specialized, in-depth works. Chapter Ten, "Global Catastrophes" is the clearest account I have ever read of mass extinction theories. I had not realized that the now very famous K-T boundary event of 65 million years ago (the dinosaur killer) is the only extinction event uncovered in the last 600 million years where the "smoking gun" of extraterrestrial iridium can be found in enough abundence to point to a comet or asteroid impact. I had thought that there was evidence to show that there were incoming impactors every 26 million years or so and that this had caused other mass extinctions including the biggest one at the Permian-Triassic boundary some 250 million years ago. These other mass extinctions may very well have come about because of purely earth-bound processes such as plate tectonics and rising and falling sea levels. Fascinating stuff to say the least! Drawings and diagrams are well done and to the point also. I recommend MacDougall as heir apparent to the Late, Great Carl Sagan as a popularizer of the great realm of science! Enjoy!

The general reader can hardly do better than J.D. Macdougall's concise history of our planet. Helpfully organized in chronological order, this work synthesizes the best current thinking by scientists in an easily understood fashion regarding our geological past. The time charts at the beginning of each eon discription keep the reader oriented to the events relationships. The use and choice of charts & graphs prove helpful without being overdone. The author's detour into the techincal aspects of dating rocks and plate techtonics could be a bit boring to the general reader, but are situated in the text so that they can be skipped easily.The author brings you right up to the present day and delivers some thoughts as to how the cycles of the past may effect our future. I feel the author is very impartial when addressing "hotbutton" issues such as global warming, etc. There is also a helpful glossary in the back and suggestions for further reading for those whose appetite on this subject is wetted.

Although this book is an excellent introduction to geology and I would recommend it highly, the adaptation to kindle has left out an important aspect: the book has many figures which help to understand the concepts and which need to be referred to again and again, and THERE ARE NO LINKS. Once you've seen a figure (the legend for which may appear pages later), that's it. Either memorise it on the spot, or make a copy on paper to refer to later (as I have - you will need a magnifying glass), because there's no easy way to refer back to it. In a book which EXPLICITLY STATES that you will need to refer to the figures several times, I found this this an extremely irritating flaw that left me annoyed with the publishers for being so lazy and incompetent, aggravated every time I saw "(see Figure 1.2)" and had no way of getting there.

This is a layman's guide to the geology of the Earth with special reference to the changes of the Earth in relation to plate tectonics. It is a pretty straight forward book and a perusal of the table of contents will give an excellent idea of the subjects narrated. The writing of the book is really well crafted and a delight to read as a quick overview of geologic processes and the effects that this has had over time. Having been copyright in 1996 it is now probably a little dated and the further reading section is obviously effected by this. I found that once I picked this book up it was hard to put down, not because the information was all that new to me, as I have a knowledge of this kind of subject matter from my reading of Scientific American, but it was such a delightful read. The flow of thought, explanation of terminology and concepts is really first class. This would be a great gift to a high school/college student who maybe expressing and interest in further studies in geology or just some of us grey haired guys who are into expanding our knowledge banks.

I expected this book to be about its title, but it was only half that. The other half was explaining geological techniques- something I couldn't have cared less about while I was reading this book. I was and am still interested in the geologic and evolutionary history of earth. When I bought this book that's what I thought I was getting. Instead, about half the pages were taken up with geologic tools, such as carbon dating. I wasn't interested in how you determined the age of a rock, but only the age of the rock and what that implied.

Also, at the end (the last chapter) he talked about the disasters that are about to occur, unless all of our money is funnelled into geologists pockets, so they can tell us what to be afraid of.

Overall, the book was okay because it delivered on at least part of what I wanted to know, but spent too much time on saying "look at all the cool things I can do". Just tell me about earth's history, not how you determined it.

It looks like this seller stole a library book and mailed it to me. this is kind of a joke as it still has the library codes on it. i suppose it could have been sold to him from another user though. good condition and came in good time