 |
|
|
|
| |
|
List Price: £20.00
Our Price: £10.09
Author:
Iain Stewart, John Lynch
By BBC Books
 Earth in all its majesty, 2008-03-27
Beautiful book and, like the TV series, is a well presented and informative guide to our planet, its formation and also addresses the problems that may occur from the legacy of human impact.
Author:
Simon Lamb, David Sington
By BBC Books
The subtitle to Earth Story is to be taken literally. This remarkable book and the accompanying TV series set out to explain with imagination and scientific rigor The Shaping of Our World. No other planet in the solar system exhibits such frenetic geological activity. The Earth's mass is in continual flux as heat from the mantel, rising to the comparatively cool surface, stirs the tectonic plates upon which the continents ride, shuffling constantly. Lamb and Sington show how the climatic effects this shuffling engenders make life possible--but they go further. Without life, they argue, there is no temperature control mechanism on the planet's surface. Without that, there can be no oceans--Earth would, like Venus, lose its water to evaporation. And without oceans to act as a lubricant there can be no movement of tectonic plates. According to this argument only a planet which can sustain life can be geologically frenetic. The Earth's geology and biology, then, are part of a single mechanism. Earth Story is no mere TV tie-in; its erudition is the equal of the best popular science, and its full-colour illustrations have the clarity and ...
Everything you need to know about the planet we call Earth!, 2003-10-09
As a first year geography student, I was recommended to buy this book by my lecturers. My first thought was that it would be dense, waffley text, and of little interest. However, I was very wrong! The 'Earth Story' is a fascinating book (based on the BBC TV series of the same name), covering billions of years of the Earth's history, and answering those questions like how the Earth was formed, how our climate is carefully controlled by the location of the continents and what triggers ice ages. The text is easy to understand, and broken up by some truly amazing photographs from around the globe (and from outside the globe!), making this book an excellent purchase for anyone - you don't need to be a student to buy this book, but simply have an interest in the amazing planet we live on! A must buy!!!
List Price: £20.00
Our Price: £6.00
Author:
Iain Stewart
By Century
excellent read , 2006-08-08
The book reads clearly and is well put together.
Stewarts style flows through the text and I thoroughly recommend this book to go with the TV series (I wish was on DVD).
The manner in which the geology is explained at is set at all levels and the interest you get from what originally you think of as just rocks was good.
List Price: £9.99
Our Price: £5.03
Author:
Richard Fortey
By HarperPerennial
The Earth: An Intimate History is prize-winning science writer Richard Fortey's latest book and an ambitious attempt to tell the geological story of planet Earth for the general reader. Several centuries and the combined efforts of thousands of professional geologists have been required to make any real sense of the Earth's structure and its 4.5 billion-year history. That Fortey manages to turn the most important aspects of all this into an enjoyable narrative for the general reader is a considerable achievement. The book is a sort of guided tour around a number of geological sites with which Fortey is personally familiar, such as the Grand Canyon, the European Alps and Vesuvius (the description of the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii in AD 79 by Pliny the Younger is probably the first clear and objective description of a geological phenomenon.) He then uses their particular geological details to build a more general story of the geology of earth as it is generally understood today. As a professional geologist at London's Natural History Museum, Fortey is well-qualified to tell this story. His writing skills have been widely acclaimed in earlier bo...
Worth the effort, 2006-09-16
The compass of this book staggered my imagination. Not a breezy book and certainly not one to course through in a sitting. The places he chooses for geological description are diverse and representative of the complex processes shaping the surface of the earth. The material is not superficial, not at all "dumbed down." Ponderous? Restructing one's view of the cosmos ... if just only the idea of earth time ... perhaps not easily digestible. The author's comprehensive synthesis (and I did not say 'simplification')in his descriptions and historical overview of the growth of knowledge and some understanding of the various macro geological processes is enviable and refreshing at least. His language, I found, lubricates the reading process for a non-specialist like me.
List Price: £16.99
Our Price: £9.39
Author:
M.H. Rider
By Rider-French Consulting Limited
Where science writing should go, 2008-06-15
I've enjoyed this book immensely since I found it in a little shop in Gairloch. Its compelling title drew me in and as soon as I saw Scotland's geology was being discussed with that of the Moon and Mars, I knew Rider was on the right track. At times, Rider leans a bit heavily on the terms and expressions he knows so well from his geology background and gentler guidance for the reader would help get some of the finer points of geology across. I also could have done without the rants about wind farms. They seemed so out of place in such a good book. Nevertheless, Rider ably mixes fine storytelling of a human dimension with the awe of Earth's history and context in the Solar System.
Well done, Malcolm Rider. Your book is a gem.
List Price: £15.95
Our Price: £8.72
Author:
Amos Nur, Dawn Burgess
By Princeton University Press
The Days the Earth Moved, 2008-06-29
"Apocalypse" is a well-written and fascinating discussion of the role that earthquakes may have played in the Bronze Age history of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Nur is a geophysicist who argues that archaeologists are too ready to reject earthquakes as a cause of the widespread devastation that is sometimes found at ancient sites. According to Nur, the archaeologist's preferred interpretation is usually that invading armies caused the destruction.
Nur admits that this interpretation may be right in many cases, but persuasively argues that archaeologists too often ignore evidence that the real cause of the devastation might have been an earthquake. Nur brings a geophysicist's perspective to the archaeologist's world, observing that many ancient sites (such as Mycenae) are affected by significant fault lines that pass directly through ancient ruins, sometimes visibly offsetting walls and staircases. Others ruins contain the remains of people killed thousands of years ago by collapsing walls or ceilings--the skeletons bear the telltale signs of the crushing injuries typical of earthquake victims.
Nur suggests that some ancient abandonments and migrations might have been triggered by earthquakes. For example, some of the devastation usually attributed to the mysterious Sea Peoples may have been caused by earthquakes, either because the earthquakes caused the destruction outright, or because they severely damaged fortifications and killed large numbers of people, leaving cities vulnerable to opportunistic invaders.
Archaeologists have tended to dismiss the earthquake explanation for sometimes widespread devastation in the ancient world because much of it (such as the events around 1200BC that preciptated the Greek Dark Ages) appears to have happened suddenly over an implausibly wide area for an earthquake. But Nur argues that very widepsread damage could have been caused by either a single very large earthquake, or by an "earthquake storm" (a cascade of earthquakes caused when one quake increases pressure on another fault, leading to a series of events). Both of these possibilities are fair game from the perspective of a geophysicist, and Nur urges that archaeologists should consider the possibility carefully when interpreting ancient sites.
Nur's book is an enjoyable mix of geology, geophysics, ancient history, geology, and forensics, but it also contains a warning. What happened in the Mediterranean and the Middle East in the ancient world can happen again, as it did during the Jericho Earthquake of 1927. If archaeologists and geophysicists can learn from each other, they are more likely to spot major earthquake hazards that might otherwise be overlooked.
List Price: £16.99
Our Price: £9.64
Author:
Peter Toghill
By The Crowood Press Ltd
The Geology of Britain, 2003-03-17
I borrowed this book from the school library for months finding it an invaluable resource in my A2 level work. I now own my own copy of this excellant book which clearly details what Britain was like, its paleogeography and its rock strata in each of the geological time periods. My only fault is that a glossery would be great but otherwise this book is worthy of the full five stars.
List Price: £19.95
Our Price: £12.70
Author:
W. S. Mackenzie, A. E. Adams
By Manson Publishing Ltd
A visual aid to studying minerals in thin section, 2008-05-21
I am currently studying geology through the Open University, and was really struggling to get my head around what minerals I was actually trying to identify. It's hard to read a description of a mineral and then try to interpret it visually. This book has come to the rescue and has been invaluable to me. Nice book and pictures are great.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|