Otherlands: A World in the Making

This book covers the natural world from the beginning to the present in a non emotional manner. A totally fascinating read.

There is nothing that irritates me more than seeing an amazing book being published under a mediocre format and only that format. Utterly disappointing. It’s like, you poor people cannot afford a 70€ book, so keep reading until you get blind #replacepinguim

This is a wonderful book!!

This book is popular science at its best, dressed in nature writing, providing a truly awe-inspiring description of habitats long past, along with the representation of continents adrift and shifting shapes. Reminiscent, as one reviewer here remarked, of Dawkins' equally fascinating and allusive "Ancestor's Tale", "Otherlands" aspires to a journey back in time: in geological time, in "deep time". With each station taking you further away from the present, the scenery changes, becoming increasingly alien and "othering" in sound (or silence) or vision. At some point, animal sizes begin to shrink, plants recede into water leaving the rocks without the soil we know, and the air changes and with it life conditions. If you're ready to google some of the flora and fauna (which is highly recommendable!), you won't deplore the absence of more illustrations in the book. There wouldn't be place for them, anyway, although a few of the descriptions seem to be verbal representation of scientific illustrations. The illustrations shown are vignettes of the globe at different geological ages, and one b/w representation of the most typical being of the respective eon. Even without any more visuals, the author surely has the magical power of rhetoric and imagination, and lures you into these places of paleontological, fossile richness in different locations all over the world. All in all, truly my best read in a very, very long (human) time!

A very informative book about the history of our planets lifeform. Not everyone will like it though. Spotlight is given to lots of non mainstream animals, which is awesome