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What I just read:
The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the discovery of Earth's antiquity, by James Repcheck. Hutton is the person who first figured out about how old Earth was: not exactly, but hundreds of millions of years, not 5500 or even 75,000. That came along with lots of examination of Scottish rocks, landforms, and erosion, and thinking about how long it must have taken for some of what he saw to form.
Hutton is obscure, and Charles Lyell a generation later is the geologist people remember for spreading this idea: part of that seems to be that Lyell's book is a lot clearer, and it's the one Charles Darwin had with him on the Beagle, so Darwin credited the idea of deep time, which also allows room for slow evolution of life, to Lyell.
The problem is that while Hutton in some sense deserves a biography, the author doesn't have a lot to work with: Hutton didn't keep diaries, and didn't send or save large numbers of letters. The author includes significant and useful context on the Scottish Enlightenment, Bonnie Prince Charlie and the 1745 Rebellion (once over lightly in about six pages), and its effects on Edinburgh politics and culture. The book's last two chapters are on how Hutton's ideas fared after his death. With all that, it's still slim. I'm not sure this book has a proper audience: if you care about this material, you probably already know most of the geology. Or, if you're coming at it from an interest in Scottish history, you know about Charles Stuart and the Scottish Enlightenment. I liked chapter 2, on the history of Bible-based chronologies, and how each later author adjusted the dates to make the world less than 6,000 years old, because their framework said that the world would only last 6,000 years. Overall, though, this is redundant if you've read John McPhee's Annals of the Former World, and McPhee is a better writer.
What I am reading now:
Banner of the Damned, by Sherwood Smith. Fantasy set in the same world as Smith's Inda series, but elsewhere in the world (at least so far) and somewhat later. Well written, but good descriptions of unpleasant people and their plotting are a mixed blessing.
At the Water's Edge: macroevolution and the transformation of life, by Carl Zimmer. Large-scale evolution, on the "how and why did our ancestors leave the water" level. This one seems to be at the right level for me; it's almost 15 years old, so we won't be meeting Tiktaalik, but that's all right.
The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the discovery of Earth's antiquity, by James Repcheck. Hutton is the person who first figured out about how old Earth was: not exactly, but hundreds of millions of years, not 5500 or even 75,000. That came along with lots of examination of Scottish rocks, landforms, and erosion, and thinking about how long it must have taken for some of what he saw to form.
Hutton is obscure, and Charles Lyell a generation later is the geologist people remember for spreading this idea: part of that seems to be that Lyell's book is a lot clearer, and it's the one Charles Darwin had with him on the Beagle, so Darwin credited the idea of deep time, which also allows room for slow evolution of life, to Lyell.
The problem is that while Hutton in some sense deserves a biography, the author doesn't have a lot to work with: Hutton didn't keep diaries, and didn't send or save large numbers of letters. The author includes significant and useful context on the Scottish Enlightenment, Bonnie Prince Charlie and the 1745 Rebellion (once over lightly in about six pages), and its effects on Edinburgh politics and culture. The book's last two chapters are on how Hutton's ideas fared after his death. With all that, it's still slim. I'm not sure this book has a proper audience: if you care about this material, you probably already know most of the geology. Or, if you're coming at it from an interest in Scottish history, you know about Charles Stuart and the Scottish Enlightenment. I liked chapter 2, on the history of Bible-based chronologies, and how each later author adjusted the dates to make the world less than 6,000 years old, because their framework said that the world would only last 6,000 years. Overall, though, this is redundant if you've read John McPhee's Annals of the Former World, and McPhee is a better writer.
What I am reading now:
Banner of the Damned, by Sherwood Smith. Fantasy set in the same world as Smith's Inda series, but elsewhere in the world (at least so far) and somewhat later. Well written, but good descriptions of unpleasant people and their plotting are a mixed blessing.
At the Water's Edge: macroevolution and the transformation of life, by Carl Zimmer. Large-scale evolution, on the "how and why did our ancestors leave the water" level. This one seems to be at the right level for me; it's almost 15 years old, so we won't be meeting Tiktaalik, but that's all right.
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