Otherlands: A World in the Making
What would it be like to experience the ancient landscapes of the past as we experience the reality of nature today? To actually visit the Jurassic or Cambrian worlds, to wander among their spectacular flora and fauna, to witness their continental shifts? In Otherlands, the multi-talented palaeontologist Thomas Halliday gives us a breath-taking up close encounter with worlds that are normally unimaginably distant.
Journeying backwards in time from the most recent Ice Age to the dawn of complex life itself, and across all seven continents, Halliday immerses us in sixteen lost ecosystems, each one rendered with a novelist's eye for detail and drama. Every description - whether the colour of a beetle's shell, the shambling rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air - is grounded in fact. We visit the birthplace of humanity on the shores of the great lake Lonyumun, in Pliocene-era Kenya; in the Miocene, we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the world has ever known as it fills the evaporated Mediterranean Sea; we encounter forests of giant fungus nine metres tall in Devonian-era Scotland; and we gaze at the light of a full and enormous moon in the Ediacaran sky, when life hasn't yet reached land.
To read Otherlands is to time travel, to see the last 550 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fantastical and familiar.
Review
An immersive world tour of prehistoric life... Halliday never loses sight of the bigger picture, nimbly marshalling a huge array of insights thrown up by recent research. Each chapter gives not only a vivid snapshot of an ecosystem in action but also insights into geology, climate science, evolution and biochemistry... Mind-blowing -- Neville Hawcock ― Financial Times
A sweeping, lyrical biography of Earth -- the geology, the biology, the extinctions and the ever-shifting ecology that defines our living planet -- Adam Rutherford ― BBC Radio 4 Start the Week
Superb... [An] epic, near-hallucinatory natural history of the living earth... Dazzling -- Simon Ings ― Telegraph
Remarkable... Ingenious... A work of immense imagination [...] rooted firmly in the actual science -- Stuart Kelly ― Scotsman
A fascinating journey through Earth's history... [Halliday] is appropriately lavish in his depiction of the variety and resilience of life, without compromising on scientific accuracy... To read Otherlands is to marvel not only at these unfamiliar lands and creatures, but also that we have the science to bring them to life in such vivid detail -- Gege Li ― New Scientist
Riveting... An intense and imaginative reading of fossils as runes that tell us about our own times, and possible future. Halliday is a Time Lord at heart, eager to lead us back to, say, the Permian or Oligocene epochs and unpack their lessons for 21st Century humanity. For all its scholarship, this is a very readable book, full of literary reference and accessible metaphor. Otherlands is also a wise manual for adaptive change rather than a prophecy of inevitable doom -- Matthew D'Ancona ― Tortoise
Thomas Halliday offers a 550m-year tour of the incredible diversity of life that has existed on our planet... Halliday's trick is to tell his story in reverse. The first hominids exit early; the continents merge and drift and merge again; the sounds of the cretaceous forest fall silent as we pass beyond the evolution of birdsong. Life retreats from land to ocean, and the first eyes give way to the sightless world of the Ediacaran, an alien realm of crawling beings -- David Farrier ― Prospect
A brilliant series of reconstructions of life in the deep past, richly imagined from the fine details of the fossil record... A real achievement... Reading Halliday's book is as near to the experience of visiting these ancient worlds as you are likely to get -- Jon Turney ― Arts Desk
Writing with gusto and bravado [...] Halliday has honed a unique voice... Otherlands is a verbal feast. You feel like you are there on the Mammoth Steppe, some 20,000 years ago, as frigid winds blow off the glacial front... Along the way, we learn astounding facts -- Steve Brusatte ― Scientific American
Vivid... An intricate analysis of our planet's interconnected past, it is impossible to come away from Otherlands without awe for what may lie ahead -- Amancai Biraben ― Independent
About the Author
Podrobnosti
| Autor |
Thomas Halliday |
|---|---|
| Vydavatel |
Allen Lane |
| Jazyk | anglicky |
| Vazba | měkká |
| Počet stran | 416 |
| Formát | 15,3 × 23,4 cm |
| EAN | 9780241510445 |
| Rok vydání | 2022 |
| Edice |
Příroda a přírodní vědy |
Autor
Thomas Halliday
Další knihy autora z oddělení Cizojazyčné knihy
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