A serviceable history of life that one wishes were more comprehensive.
The title tells it all.
Nature senior editor Gee spends only two pages on the beginning of Earth, when a cloud of dust circling the sun coalesced into a planet about 4.6 billion years ago. The infant Earth was molten rock that eventually cooled enough for atmospheric water to condense into oceans, and it’s amazing, as the author rightly notes, how quickly it appeared—perhaps 100 million years after the planet formed. Early Earth lacked oxygen, so there was no ozone layer in the upper atmosphere to block the sun’s ultraviolet rays, which sterilized everything above the surface of the sea. Consequently, primitive bacteria lived deep in the ocean for at least 1 billion years until some evolved pigments that absorbed these rays to produce sugar. This was photosynthesis. Its fiercely reactive waste product, oxygen, produced the first mass extinction of life that had evolved in its absence. As Gee relates, it was another several billion years before primitive bacteria (prokaryotes) evolved into advanced bacteria (eukaryotes), which accelerated evolution, forming multicellular life forms by 800 million years ago as well as the first animals—sponges. Life moved onto land 500 million years ago and broke its dependence on the sea not through legs (some fish have legs) but with hard-shelled eggs and seeds. Racing through dinosaurs and mammals, Gee introduce apes less than two-thirds into the text and hominins a few pages later. Readers should be chastened at his conclusion, shared by most scientists, that Homo sapiens is making its habitat—the Earth—progressively less habitable and will become extinct in a few thousand years. For a primer on evolution, readers might prefer Andrew Knoll’s A Brief History of Earth (2021) for one reason: illustrations. Gee writes lucid, accessible prose, but readers of his thorough descriptions of long-extinct creatures or explanations of how body parts evolved will yearn in vain for pictures.
A serviceable history of life that one wishes were more comprehensive.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-27665-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
An erudite guide to the biblical world.
Revelations from the Old Testament.
“The Bible has no rivals when it comes to the art of omission, of not saying what everyone would like to know,” observes Calasso (1941-2021), the acclaimed Italian publisher, translator, and explorer of myth, gods, and sacred ritual. In this probing inquiry into biblical mysteries, the author meditates on the complexities and contradictions of key events and figures. He examines the “enigmatic nature” of original sin in Genesis, an anomaly occurring in no other creation myth; God’s mandate of circumcision for all Jewish men; and theomorphism in the form of Adam: a man created in the image of the god who made him. Among the individuals Calasso attends to in an abundantly populated volume are Saul, the first king of Israel; the handsome shepherd David, his successor; David’s son Solomon, whose relatively peaceful reign allowed him “to look at the world and study it”; Moses, steeped in “law and vengeance,” who incited the slaughter of firstborn sons; and powerful women, including the Queen of Sheba (“very beautiful and probably a witch”), Jezebel, and the “prophetess” Miriam, Moses’ sister. Raging throughout is Yahweh, a vengeful God who demands unquestioned obedience to his commandments. “Yahweh was a god who wanted to defeat other gods,” Calasso writes. “I am a jealous God,” Yahweh proclaims, “who punishes the children for the sins of their fathers, as far as the third and fourth generations.” Conflicts seemed endless: During the reigns of Saul and David, “war was constant, war without and war within.” Terse exchanges between David and Yahweh were, above all, “military decisions.” David’s 40-year reign was “harrowing and glorious,” marked by recurring battles with the Philistines. Calasso makes palpable schisms and rivalries, persecutions and retributions, holocausts and sacrifices as tribal groups battled one another to form “a single entity”—the people of Israel.
An erudite guide to the biblical world.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-60189-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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