![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Two non-fiction books which I had very different reactions to.
Entangled Life - Merlin Sheldrake
This book is ostensibly about fungi, that whole kingdom of life, and its many varied forms and its relationship to humans. What this book actually is about is Merlin Sheldrake's personal anecdotes about getting high, getting drunk, ramblings about the one-ness of the world and the blurring of the barriers between the
( Entangled Life )
Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction - George McGhee
This book was a lot more enjoyable and insightful. It covers the late Devonian extinctions (about 370 million years ago), through the Carboniferous and Permian, ending with (of course) the terrifying end-Permian extinction.
I found this interesting and sometimes dense to read. I am never going to be a geologist and honestly sometimes when McGhee was describing glacial interpulses I had to really work on focusing, but you can't really understand paleontology without at least a little geology - the history of the past is encoded in rocks! - and there was genuinely a lot of scholarship and information presented.
McGhee presented information at the granularity of Stages, so instead of talking about Devonian, or late Devonian, he would refer to the Frasnian stage. I have memorized the GTS down to the periods/epochs, but this was tricky and I kept flipping back and forth between the text and the tables showing the names of the stages, the years it covered, oxygen levels, glacial coverage, etc. I can see why, though - the stages cover around somewhere from a few million to a dozen million years, which is yes a lot of time, but not as much as say the period (fifty, eighty million years) and allows discussion about what the climate was like for that specific chunk of time in fairly fine detail.
( Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction )
Entangled Life - Merlin Sheldrake
This book is ostensibly about fungi, that whole kingdom of life, and its many varied forms and its relationship to humans. What this book actually is about is Merlin Sheldrake's personal anecdotes about getting high, getting drunk, ramblings about the one-ness of the world and the blurring of the barriers between the
( Entangled Life )
Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction - George McGhee
This book was a lot more enjoyable and insightful. It covers the late Devonian extinctions (about 370 million years ago), through the Carboniferous and Permian, ending with (of course) the terrifying end-Permian extinction.
I found this interesting and sometimes dense to read. I am never going to be a geologist and honestly sometimes when McGhee was describing glacial interpulses I had to really work on focusing, but you can't really understand paleontology without at least a little geology - the history of the past is encoded in rocks! - and there was genuinely a lot of scholarship and information presented.
McGhee presented information at the granularity of Stages, so instead of talking about Devonian, or late Devonian, he would refer to the Frasnian stage. I have memorized the GTS down to the periods/epochs, but this was tricky and I kept flipping back and forth between the text and the tables showing the names of the stages, the years it covered, oxygen levels, glacial coverage, etc. I can see why, though - the stages cover around somewhere from a few million to a dozen million years, which is yes a lot of time, but not as much as say the period (fifty, eighty million years) and allows discussion about what the climate was like for that specific chunk of time in fairly fine detail.
( Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction )
