A scientific tour de force that tackles the ubiquitous questions of life and meaning.
A leading climate scientist reflects on the origins and interconnectedness of life in this sweeping nonfiction book.
“Earth had a difficult start,” Golledge writes in the book’s opening lines as he describes a planet with superheated temperatures that was “continuously assaulted by extraterrestrial impacts.” Yet, at play across the eons of Earth’s early history was a network of interconnected changes that would give rise to life. Massive lightning storms that heated clay minerals to 1,000 degrees hotter than their melting point created “fossilized storm rocks” that, when eroded over time by acid rain, provided “a continual supply of the building blocks needed for molecules such as DNA.” In Golledge’s epic, poetic retelling of the history of life through a scientific lens, he consistently emphasizes the “unseen changes that bring about gradual improvements by refining, little by little, the way a system works.” These interlocking feedback systems are the invisible hands, as the author describes them, that shape life on Earth. The rise of humans as Earth’s dominant species also contributed to reshaping the planet. By the end of the last ice age, Golledge notes, “species after species went extinct” due to the overhunting of large prey. After the book’s imposing accounts of Earth’s early history, its middle chapters provide a longue durée account of human society from early civilizations through our “coming of age” via space exploration in the 20th century.
Golledge lucidly covers the ways climate and geological feedback systems have shaped cultures and societies. “Climatic switching that could, in a geologic instant, trigger sweeping cascades of environmental change” would be interpreted by their human victims as the “Wrath of the Gods,” and civilizations developed complex religious explanations. The rise of intricate religious systems exacerbated humanity’s tribalistic tendencies, with negative outcomes such as war and persecution that fostered us-versus-them mentalities. The book’s more philosophical concluding chapters ruminate on the essential web of life, comparing our consciousness, for instance, to an old-growth forest that is “wired for healing” and provides communal protection and identity that transcends a single, isolated tree. The book’s final chapter reflects on how the scientific lens of feedback offers insights on finding beauty and meaning in life, the arts, and literature. Indeed, the book’s emphasis on culture—and its ample interdisciplinary references to literature, art, religion, philosophy, and history—make the work stand out from other scientific primers. One cannot escape the fundamental questions of philosophy, existence, and meaning when engaging with the book’s scientific inquiry. A professor of glaciology at New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington, Golledge is a renowned climate scientist whose work on Antarctica has appeared in dozens of peer-reviewed scientific journals and has been referenced in the New York Times, National Geographic, and more. Through measured, nonpoliticized analysis, the book also offers a damning, if subtle, rebuke of climate change denialism in its emphasis on the ways in which humans contribute to environmental degradation. As groundbreaking as his research may be, Golledge best shows his talent by distilling complicated science into an accessible, engaging work that includes a 20-page glossary. The book’s almost lyrical narrative, comparable to the metaphysical lure of Carl Sagan’s compelling commentary on the cosmos, is accompanied by almost 400 research endnotes.
A scientific tour de force that tackles the ubiquitous questions of life and meaning.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781633889330
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.
The accomplished British nature writer turns to issues of environmental ethics in his latest exploration of the world.
In 1971, a law instructor asked a musing-out-loud question: Do trees have legal standing? His answer was widely mocked at the time, but it has gained in force: As Macfarlane chronicles here, Indigenous groups around the world are pressing “an idea that changes the world—the idea that a river is alive.” In the first major section of the book, Macfarlane travels to the Ecuadorian rainforest, where a river flows straight through a belt of gold and other mineral deposits that are, of course, much desired; his company on a long slog through the woods is a brilliant mycologist whose research projects have led not just to the discovery of a mushroom species that “would have first flourished on the supercontinent [of Gondwana] that formed over half a billion years ago,” but also to her proposing that fungi be considered a kingdom on a footing with flora and fauna. Other formidable activists figure in his next travels, to the great rivers of northern India, where, against the odds, some courts have lately been given to “shift Indian law away from anthropocentrism and towards something like ecological jurisprudence, underpinned by social justice.” The best part of the book, for those who enjoy outdoor thrills and spills, is Macfarlane’s third campaign, this one following a river in eastern Canada that, as has already happened to so many waterways there, is threatened to be impounded for hydroelectric power and other extractive uses. In delightfully eccentric company, and guided by the wisdom of an Indigenous woman who advises him to ask the river just one question, Macfarlane travels through territory so rugged that “even the trout have portage trails,” returning with hard-won wisdom about our evanescence and, one hopes, a river’s permanence and power to shape our lives for the better.
Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780393242133
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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