Life: an Unauthorized Biography by Richard Fortey

Life: an Unauthorized Biography by Richard Fortey

A magisterial exploration of the natural history of the first four thousand million years of life on and in the earth, by one of Britain’s most dazzling science writers. What do any of us know about the history of our planet before the arrival of man? Most of us have a dim impression of a swirling mass of dust solidifying to form a volcanic globe, briefly populated by dinosaurs, then by woolly mammoths and finally by our own hairy ancestors. This book, aimed at the curious and intelligent but perhaps mildly uninformed reader, brilliantly dispells such lingering notions forever. It guides us from the barren globe spinning through space, through the very earliest signs of life on the rims of volcanoes, the appearance of cells, the creation of an atmosphere and the myriad forms of plants and animals (happily including dinosaurs) which could then evolve and be sustained, right up to the first appearance of man. Richard Fortey ranges across a great multiplicity of scientific disciplines analysing findings and arguments about the origins of life, the causes of extinctions and the first appearance of man, in a wonderfully clear and refreshing way. At the end of the book we understand the complexity of the history of life on earth, and the complexity of how it has come to be understood, as perhaps, from no other single volume. But it is not simply what Richard Fortey has to tell us that makes this book so distinctive. His grasp of the significant detail and his power of allusion mark him as one of the finest scientific explicators. This book entertains as much as it informs. The result if enthralling.

‘Don’t drop dead until you have read The Hidden Landscape’
Jonathan Keates, Observer

‘Richard Fortey communicates the excitement of science and scientific discovery to the lay person in a way that all scientific geniuses should be able to but often can’t. For sheer passionate communication of his subject, he has no one to beat him.’
Susan Hill, Radio 4

‘I have read The Hidden Landscape in a state of sustained fascination… We have here a new classic. This is popular science at its best.’
J.D.F. Jones, Financial Times

Richard Fortey spent his working life in palaeontology at the Natural History Museum, specialising in trilobites and becoming a world expert. He was elected President of the Geological Society of London for its bicentennial year of 2007 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Literature. He has received the Frink Medal, the Michael Faraday Prize and the Lewis Thomas Prize for science writing, as well as the silver medal of the Zoological Society for science communication. He is the writer of eight previous science and nature books, including two Sunday Times bestsellers, all of which are still in print. He has presented many television programmes across the BBC and other channels.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780002555609
ISBN 10	0002555603
Title	Life: an Unauthorized Biography
Author	Richard Fortey
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers
Year published	1997-07-24
Number of pages	416
Prizes	Short-listed for Rhone-Poulenc Science Books Prize 1998
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable