Chris Packham's Favourite Books About Earth
By HarperCollins UK
Chris Packham's Favourite Books About Earth
By HarperCollins UK
‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ is an epithet boldly abused, there have been too many, too often for any such claims to be true. But I might just summon the bravery to gently proffer this biography of our planet as a contender. It's certainly been the longest in the making - 4.5 million years, it certainly has the most dramatic events - asteroid impacts, super-volcanoes, mass extinction events and it has a remarkable cast - everything that has ever lived. And it’s a cliff-hanger as we humans seem to be on the brink of closing one of its most important chapters very rapidly. But it's also surprising, initially no land . . . then giant fungi dominating the land, alligators at the north pole, two million years of rain and at one point the whole planet buried under glacial ice.
The plot twists are almost unbelievable, life and geology in a constant struggle to find stability and balance, and then there’s us, so smart, so special but so seemingly hell bent on breaking that balance . Of course, what this saga tells us is that life will go on whatever, on perhaps the only planet in the universe with life of any kind. What a special place the Earth is and this is its story.
Chris Packham
The Earth From Space
£34.95 £33.20
It’s a simple premise beautifully executed and the images are mostly exquisite . . . those that reveal the scale of the human impact are mostly scary. But it’s the truth, this is the surface of our earth today and its tapestries of life, land and water are wonderful.
The Origin of Life
Paul Davies
£12.99 £12.34What is life? When does something essentially become ‘alive’? Where and when did life arise on Earth? Big questions about long ago little things which opens a world of imagination and intrigue. Its page one, but it’s extraordinary and fascinating and absolutely compelling.
Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth - Updated Edition
Andrew H. Knoll
£16.99A treatise of great up to date science by scientists incorporating a global romp of palaeontological discoveries, molecular biology and the earths forces. This is back to basics, the roots of our living planet and its great!
Wonderful Life
Stephen Jay Gould
£12.99 £12.34Bizarre trace fossils are brought to life to present a long forgotten fauna, almost alien, many utterly unlike any contemporary species. So is evolution as simple and straightforward as Darwin proposed or is pure chance a key player on how life happens? Gould and his great imagination pontificate on this.