Book ReviewsHGS Bulletin, April, 2005Earth: An Intimate HistoryBy Richard ForteyAlfred A. Knopf, New York, 2004405 pp. + index $30.00Fortey has done it again. The English paleontologist, already author of two acclaimed popular science books, Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth and Trilobite! Witness to Evolution, has produced a third which may be the best of the lot.In Earth: An Intimate History, Mr. Fortey takes the reader on a grand tour of the geology of the world, starting at the Bay of Naples with a description of Mount Vesuvius and then swooping from outcrop to outcrop around the planet, finally returning to Italy for his finale.Some of the finest pleasures of his previous books have been Mr. Fortey’s descriptions of terrains. His technique in Earth is to first describe the landscape of each area of interest and its relationship with the people who live there before delving into the geology that created the terrain. Along the way, he tells the stories of the scientists who, through hard work and trial and error, have unraveled the history of our world.Mr. Fortey leaves few geological bases untouched as he goes around the earth. His lucid explanation of plate tectonics is woven through the entire fabric of the book as he explains how so much of the form of the Earth is the result of the collisions, splitting aparts, grinding togethers, and subductions of the mobile crust of the planet.The book describes in geologically delicious terms many of the critical places in the history of our science and the geology of the earth, with chapters devoted to Pompeii and Herculaneum, Hawaii, the Alps, the development of the theory of plate tectonics, the “ancient ranges” of the Appalachians and Caledonides as typified in Newfoundland, the geological origins of the dollar, the Deccan traps and the nature of granite, faults around the world, the age of the planet and Precambrian continents, a wonderful description of a mule ride into the Grand Canyon, the earth from surface to core, and finally a whirlwind journey around the earth that ties it all together. This is not a “coffee table” book—the text is the thing--but it is loaded with illustrations, both drawings and color photographs, that come with informative captions.The author is successful with his method of presentation—starting with the surface of the world as we see it before plunging into the rocks—in large part because he has seen so much of the planet. Fortey’s search for trilobites has taken him to all sorts of odd places, starting with a bleak island near Spitzbergen doing his graduate work, an experience that he described—appropriately bleakly—in his first book, Life. He is not at all lyrical about some of the landscapes in Earth, either. For example, he describes a sabkha along the coast of Arabia as “a dark and scrofulous-looking patch”—“the most treacherous place I have ever visited, a darkly crusty, boiling hot wasteland, sprouting gypsum crystals like perverse jewels.”Earth is very readable and entertaining, as well as being informative. It is on a level with John McPhee’s similarly acclaimed books about North America (Rising from the Plains, Basin and Range, etc.). The difference between the two is that Mr. Fortey writes in a slightly more technical style because of his professional background, whereas Mr. McPhee, a journalist, wrote his books for the mostly non-scientific, but educated, readers of the New Yorker.I recommend Richard Fortey’s book highly to anyone interested in understanding how the world works or in just a darn good read.Copyright 2005, James Allan Ragsdale, reviewer.