Rating: 
Summary: Great Subject Matter, but overall a disappointing book
Review:
I purchased this book to read on a scuba diving trip in eastern Indonesia over Christmas and was very disappointed (I should have read the online reviews before I did). While the subject matter is fascinating, and a large part of the narrative engaging, much too much time is spent by the author digressing into his often unrelated personal experiences during his travels around the world, name dropping those in his profession, inserting strained literary references and generally telling the reader endless amounts of useless information. Admittedly, in Chapter 1 the Author tells the readers that "where my own experiences with people or places will serve to bring the process of investigation alive then I shall make diversions, the better to illuminate the way forward." This sounds great in theory and a valid alternative to dry, impersonal prose. The problem is that these many, many diversions provide no illumination at all on the subject matter (or the way forward), and they make much of the book read like a bad travelogue, with the author telling us he's in London or Oman or China or somewhere else and how fascinating or wonderful his trip is, such as a conference in Wales where we are told during a dinner he "sat next to a jolly professor of Celtic languages who explained the bardic tradition to me." How does this possibly illuminate anything remotely related to natural history? A few such diversions are tolerable or even folksy, but unfortunately they are never ending in this book. In addition, the work suffers from an appalling lack of tables, maps, charts, diagrams and similar visual information that would help the reader better understand the subject matter. Instead, the book contains pictures of such things as (and I'm not making this up) a row of slot machines in a Las Vegas casino and the tablecloth used during teatime by Lady Smith Woodward. If you want a good book on the natural history of the Earth, keep shopping.
Rating: 
Summary: A Marvelous Journey!................
Review: ............through the biological history of our planet, written by a world- renowned paleontologist with a distinct ability to share his love for his work with readers.If you are interested, even in the slightest, about the origins of life on earth and the magnificent evolution of species, than you'll simply love this book, which takes us from the first formation of cellular components and cells some 3.5 billion years ago in the waters of the Pre-Cambrian and Cambrian periods to the formation of multicellular organisms including the first animals. The Ordovician Period, during which our oceans teemed with trilobites, reflects the origin of coral reefs, whose evolution, among many others, is traced through to the modern day. The Silurian Period saw the origins of terrestrial plants and began the "greening" of our world which took place over tens of millions of years into the Devonian Period. It was then, during the Devonian, that animal life first crept from the seas onto land. Fortey traces the evolution of fish who ultimately gave rise to a species capable of living and walking on land and who is the ancestor to every terapod (land vertebrates, including humans) on earth today. By the Carboniferous Period, there are traces of terapods all over the earth's land and within it's coal forests. Seed reproduction becomes more common and our world is populated by a variety trees, amphibians, flying insects, etc. This period reflects the dawn of the earliest reptile. We then move to the Permian period during which the supercontinent Pangaea was a single entity. Fortey traces "continental drift" to the modern day with all its amazing evolutionary implications for the landscape and its associated flora and fauna. It is during the Permian that we find the first fossil egg with a shell. At the end of the Permian and again at the end of the Triassic (the period of the origin of the dinosaurs) the planet saw mass extinctions. Dinosaurs dominated the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods which followed, despite the "enlargening" of other animal species, and only their extinction permitted the beginning of the Age of Mammals that followed. The Jurassic also shows evidence of the first reptile-like birds and the Cretaceous gave us the first flowering plants. The book's final chapters take us through the success of the mammal and the rise of man right up to our own species. Throughout the book, the reader never ceases to be amazed at the events that have shaped life on our planet and by the fact that had even a single event been slightly altered, the course of life on the earth would have been dramatically different. Each step of the magnificent process of evolution is highlighted with fossil evidence, be it evidence for a previously unknown species, a better understanding of a mass extinction, new knowledge about animal behavior, or information that allows us to better understand ourselves as homo sapien. I highly recommend this most readable and very solidly researched story of the history of the natural world.
Rating:
Summary: More than worth the time to read.
Review: A biology tour from the formation of Earth to the appearance of Homo Sapiens, written in an urbane style and filled with anecdotes about the field of paleontology and its people. The structure and pace of the book match the march of life through the millennia, almost to scale. For example, primates occupied only the last few pages. Fortey was particularly excellent in his description of the K-T event and how it was unraveled scientifically.
Rating:
Summary: It seems like only yesterday!
Review: A book which attempts to cover four billion years in less than four hundred pages is going to have to be a survey aimed at the general reader. If you like serious scientific tomes which discourage humour and a bit of artistic license in written presentations-- this is not for you. Fortney's book is an engaging and enjoyable read that gives insight into the development of life on earth and the scientific field of paleontology. His gifts for constructing an accessible and often charming narrative, quoting poets and bards, noting geniuses and quacks, is a great tribute to English educational system-- which here has developed a devoted scientific mind, obviously entranced by his subject matter, who can express himself with elegance, comprehension, wit and some self deprecation, a refreshing attribute for a scientist.
Rating:
Summary: So, here we are 4,000 million years later
Review: British paleontologist Richard Fortey has written a marvelously concise and erudite historical synopsis of terrestrial life from around 4,000 million years ago, when meteors seeded the planet with the elements, most importantly carbon, that allowed for the evolution of organic molecules, to around 25,000 years ago, when Cro-Magnon Homo sapiens founded interior decorating by painting animals on the walls of his cave living-rooms. Fortey's account necessarily leaves off with the beginning of recorded history. (Blessedly, the life forms "Benifer" and Michael Jackson fail to appear in the narrative even once.) The author hits the high points, including the evolution of single cells, the formation of bacterial colonies, the initiation of chlorophyll-based photosynthesis (that ultimately charged the atmosphere with oxygen), the specialization of cells into tissues, the population of the seas, the advance onto land, the greening of the earth, the separation of ancient Pangaea into today's separate continents, the Age of Dinosaurs, the advent of live-birth from wombs, the ascendancy of mammals, and finally the evolution of Man. For me, the most interesting chapter was on the apocalyptic cataclysm which ended the Age of Dinosaurs, i.e. the asteroid which apparently slammed into the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula creating the Chicxulub Crater. The volume also includes several photo sections that provide an adequate visual summary of the text. The time spans of Fortey's tale are almost beyond mental grasp. For instance, at one point the author states that tool making by hominids began about 2.5 million years ago. Yet the style of the tools, the "technology" if you will, then remained virtually unchanged for the next million years. After witnessing the dizzying pace of technological advancement just during the span of my own life, this stagnation for such an incomprehensible length of time is mind-boggling. I wish I had but a fraction of Fortey's knowledge of our world. LIFE should be required reading in every high school science program.
Rating: 
Summary: where was the editor?
Review: Do not read this book if you are interested in learning about the history of life. There are much more concise and precise books on this subject out there. Do read this book if you wish to see a scientist quote poetry. attempt to be funny and meander from topic to topic in a stream-of-consciousness format.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic
Review: Finally a book that ties it all together. For those interested in the myriad of sciences that make up our world this book is a must read. Written for the general public it is easy to understand and the author makes it an exciting journey. Nothing dull about this book.
Rating:
Summary: More stuff, less fluff please.
Review: Fortey is surprisingly adept at constructing an elegant English sentence. And he makes this clear to the reader over and over and over again. During the entire page that Fortey spent musing about the early death of the "English Mozart" George Frederick Pinto, finally to compare it to the early extinction of some Cambrian animal, I found myself thinking how much I'd rather be shown a drawing of a Cambrian animal, or perhaps read a brief definition of "mitochondria" or "brachiopod". I don't think I'd exaggerate to say half the book is spent in elegant digressions into his career, pop culture, the arts, and myriad other tangential topics, while the other half suffers from a deficit of detail. Perhaps he thought these would engage the reader, but I, for one, am a reader who found the title engaging and would like to read a good deal more about it than this book offers.
Rating: 
Summary: Superb summary of scope of life
Review: Fortey pulls off a tour de force, compressing billions of years of development into quickly read pages. His explanations are great for the layman (such as myself) who lacks the biological underpinnings to fully understand the transformative process. I learned the context into which life grew and expanded, and I feel as if I gained quite a lot of insight into the periodic throes of disaster and explosion that have characterized the history of life. My only real criticism is his treatment of the latest stages of life, which appear to be quite cursory compared to his true areas of interest: trilobites and other sea creatures. However, I forgive him this: it's hard to talk about human evolution concisely, but I need to read more about that area. I also recommend Fortey's "Trilobite" as a great title, even if you knew nothing about the creatures. I didn't even know their name was literal: three lobes.
Rating:
Summary: Fitting title for a rewarding read!
Review: From its beginnings on the still-forming planet to the recent emergence of Homo sapiens, one of the world's leading paleontologists narrates how & why life on earth developed as it did. Interlacing an autobiographical tale of his own adventures in the field with vivid descriptions of creatures who emerged & disappeared in the long march of geologic time, the author sheds light upon a fascinating array of evolutionary wonders, mysteries, & debates. Brimming with wit, literary style, & the joy of discovery, this is an indispensable book that will delight the general reader & the scientist alike.
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