Skip to main content

Paleontology, an illustrated history - David Bainbridge ***

I really wanted to like David Bainbridge's illustrated palaeontology book more than I did in practice. One of the few criticisms I had of Henry Gee's impressive A Very Short History of Life on Earth was its lack of illustrations. Here the illustrations are centre stage. In fact they've taken over the whole show. Much of Bainbridge's text is interesting, but I found the book almost impossible to read as practically every other time I turned a page, the flow of the writing was broken by large captions for illustrations, which felt like they were part of the main text but weren't. Rather than link the illustrations to the main text, many of them were almost standalone spreads. As a result, the design simply doesn't work very well.

That's a shame, because the text I did manage to read took an interesting course of breaking the chronologically based chapters into sections devoted to specific palaeontologists, from Smith, Anning and Darwin to Clack and Khudi. (The final chapter deviates a little from this format as there is also a section on the movie versions of King Kong and Jurassic Park, which is entertaining, if not exactly fitting with the rest.) The illustrations have a good range, but the artily subdued tones they are printed in tend to reduce the impact - this would have been better going the full Technicolor.

I suspect the structure will make this a difficult book to stick with for someone who hasn't already read a bit on the subject. As a result, I think it works best to fill in illustrated details on people and discoveries the reader has already encountered elsewhere. Not a disaster by any means, but it wouldn't have taken much to have made it significantly better.

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...