Will I love Becoming Earth?

This book is breath; 4 different kinds:
1. The breath of fresh air that this book is, upending conventional thinking.
2. The breath of the earth, as the author comports fiercely with the Gaia hypothesis.
3. The breath of relaxation, as the author validates my opinion of the workings of the earth, which I’ve felt for quite some time, and I’m thrilled to see in print.
4. The breath of anticipatory inhalation, when cracking open the book, and satisfied exhalation, when concluding.
What a pleasant experience. It’s good to breathe.

Deep history is the subject in non-fiction today, just as travel writing was in the ’80s, the new nature writing following Robert Macfarlane in the noughties. With 4 billion years of life on earth to play with, it’s a rich field. Ferris Jabr’s book covers similar broad ground to my Thinking Small and Large, but the examples in the two books are mostly different, a demonstration of the burgeoning information now available on the evolution of life. Jabr takes James Lovelock’s Gaia theory as his touchstone, demonstrating the one-ness of life and the earth’s physical features and continuing evolution. At… show more.