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Life : A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of
Life on Earth
by Richard Fortey
Amazon.com Review
 "The
excitement of discovery cannot be bought, or faked, or learned from books," London
Natural History Museum senior paleontologist Richard Fortey writes in Life. The
first chapter, an engrossing account of an Arctic fossil-hunting expedition he undertook
as a university student, will bring shivers to anyone who has ever ignored cold hands,
hunger, and filthy socks to keep looking for something new, some piece of rock or bit of
plant that may hold the key to the gleaming certainty of understanding. Fortey's
descriptions of scruffy field assistants and eccentrically brilliant scientists are easily
as interesting as the billions of years of evolution he so imaginatively describes. After
all, the fossil record has not been accepted without controversy, and the arguments among
fallible evolutionary biologists as they refined their theories make for great reading.
But it is the little animals that make up our distant ancestry that are the focus here.
The often mysterious fossils they left behind are like a history book in a language we
don't know--the history of bugs and birds, humans and cauliflowers. One by one, Fortey
reveals how the puzzles of paleontology have been subjected to the scientific method and
to the politics and personal ambitions of academia, until a beautifully clear path is
traced from the very first traces of life all the way across the eons to the advent of Homo
sapiens. Fortey's elegantly written tour lets us share his passion for ancient seas
and the animals that frolicked in them, and understand how time and chance contributed to
the biography of us all. --Therese Littleton --Copyright © Amazon.com,
Inc.
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