from: W. W. Norton & Company
Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 576.83
EAN num: 9780393050035
ISBN number: 0393050033
Label: W. W. Norton & Company
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 256
Printing Date: January 15, 2001
Publishing house: W. W. Norton & Company
Sale Popularity Level: 1094142
Studio: W. W. Norton & Company
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
A new edition of the beautifully illustrated depiction of the dramatic story of survival and extinction. The Book of Life uses an exemplary fusion of art and science to tell the story of life on earth. The text, under the editorship of Stephen Jay Gould, provides thorough understanding of the latest research and is accompanied by paintings prepared especially for this book. Never before has our planet's evolution been so clearly, so ingeniously explained. History is marked by disaster. The Book of Life explains how mammals, having survived at least one of these disasters--the impact of a massive comet--luckily inherited the earth. Next came the rise of modern humans, who would shape the world as no creature has. As this fascinating history unfolds, gorgeous illustrations allow us to observe climate changes, tectonic plate movement, the spread of plant life, and the death of the dinosaurs. We discover the chains of animal survival, the causes and consequences of adaptation, and finally the environmental impact of human life.
Amazon.com Review:
An unusual scientific reference work by any measure, The Book of Life opens with an unusual protest from its editor, Stephen Jay Gould, who worries that it may have left out much of importance discovered between the present and the book's original publication in 1993. Gould's worry is well placed--in the last few years, many advances have been made in taxonomy and genetics, to name just two areas. Still, the book is a lucid, readily comprehensible, and largely up-to-date overview of the origins and evolution of life on earth, from the emergence of bacteria 4 billion years ago to that of Homo sapiens in recent geological time. Written by distinguished scientists, the text proceeds chronologically, giving an in-depth account of the fossil record. It is matched by hundreds of paintings, drawings, charts, and graphs that reinforce the authors' discussions.
More than all that, The Book of Life is a manifesto proclaiming the essential correctness of evolutionary theory, which has come under fire in places like Afghanistan and Kansas. 'Life has changed through time,' paleontologist Michael Benton observes. 'No other explanation will account for the sequence and variety of the life forms preserved as fossils, or the history recorded since humankind began to draw, paint, and carve, about 30,000 years ago.' The book's careful documentation of those changes makes it a highly useful reference for high school and university students, and it's a book that rewards casual browsing as well. --Gregory McNamee
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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Excellent book. The evolution of the vertebrates written by the most important investigators. Images and excellent graphics. The chapter about the history of the representations of the extinguished animals is very good
Rated by buyers 
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This is an excellent book. I return to it often to skim through and remind myself about the astonishing diversity of life that has thrived on our world.
-- Guy P. Harrison, author of 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God (Prometheus Books)
Rated by buyers -
...a little behind the times and anthropocentric. These failings are admitted in the book, however, and do not much detract from its being a useful work.
Recommended.
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I think this is a great book. It has a lot of interesting material, but it's also very readable. I consider it an intermediate level book. It doesn't require any previous knowledge, but there is a lot of material and it sometimes comes quite fast. Some of the material is more complex than one usually finds in popular science books, but it is usually put is boxes separate from the main text.
The book opens up with some introductory material. It's pretty standard: geological time, continental drift, fossils and a high level view of the tree of life. The book is biased towards the evolution that lead to humans, but this bias is explained in the introduction.
The books starts at the beginning, explaining why carbon is essential to life as we know it, describing prokaryotes, describing eukaryotes and it looks at what we know about pre-Cambrian life. Then it moves on to the Cambrian explosion, fish, tetrapods, amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, mammals and humans. A lot of very interesting material is presented, a small sample would be: cyanobacteria and the increase in atmospheric oxygen levels, the evolution of legs from fins, biomechanics, mass extinctions and molecular clocks.
I think this book would appeal to a wide range of people. Obviously the amount of material available for a book like this is enormous. So the challenge of an author/editor is deciding what to include and what to leave out. I think this book had a very nice selection. Most of the material is accessible. There is more challenging material and although it adds a lot to the book, even most of this could be skipped without hindering comprehension of the remaining material. I also thought the illustrations were very good. The amount of material is impressive, as is the clarity (in general) of the writing.
Rated by buyers -
The Book of Life, an illustrated history of the evolution of life on Earth, edited by Stephen Jay Gould is a great gift for any natural history fan.
Chapter after chapter about the evolution of fish, dinosaurs, mammals and mankind by such greats as Peter Andrews, Christine Jones and Michael Benton. How did fish develop and make it to land? Why did mammals do so well after the dinosaurs died? And the illustrations, alone, are worth the price of the book.
Of course most of the questions can't be answered but just exploring the issues and topics is fun. Thinking is good for you and this book plugs into many of my other natural history interests allowing me to have a foundation, a background, before diving into the more advanced books on the same subjects.
True, being very first published in 1993 and updated in 2001, means that the information is slightly outdated. For example, we DO know what a dinosaur heart looks like and we DO have soft tissue from a T-Rex bone. Also, they seem to be linking Homo ergaster to Homo habilis while all the other books I have on human evolution seems to link H. ergaster to Homo erectus.
The book is good for any library, new or used, so go buy it.
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