The Miner's Canary

Rating:
Summary: canary's song a little flat
Review: This is a reasonable book for someone who knows nothing about the history of extinctions, or evolution and historical geology, in general. Eldredge takes great pains to describe the phenomenon of extinction (background and mass) in the most popular terms possible. He also tries to inject some humanity into his narrative by introducing ideas and their originators at the same time. This is a game effort, but the scientists never really become more than names to the reader. One of Eldredge's goals is to introduce the absolutely uninitiated to the idea that Homo sapiens is not responsible for most extinctions in Earth history. For readers still hazy about the fact that our genus is only about 3.5 million years old and that life has been around for at least 3.5 billion years, this is a good lesson to pound across. For everyone else it will seem like a dogged repitition of the obvious. When one finished reading this book extinction will definitely be a lot less mysterious, but I don't think it will have been made much more interesting.

Rating:
Summary: canary's song a little flat
Review: This is a reasonable book for someone who knows nothing about the history of extinctions, or evolution and historical geology, in general. Eldredge takes great pains to describe the phenomenon of extinction (background and mass) in the most popular terms possible. He also tries to inject some humanity into his narrative by introducing ideas and their originators at the same time. This is a game effort, but the scientists never really become more than names to the reader. One of Eldredge's goals is to introduce the absolutely uninitiated to the idea that Homo sapiens is not responsible for most extinctions in Earth history. For readers still hazy about the fact that our genus is only about 3.5 million years old and that life has been around for at least 3.5 billion years, this is a good lesson to pound across. For everyone else it will seem like a dogged repitition of the obvious. When one finished reading this book extinction will definitely be a lot less mysterious, but I don't think it will have been made much more interesting.