Why read The Planet in a Pebble?

Book cover of The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey Into Earth's Deep History

Book description

This is the story of a single pebble. It is just a normal pebble, as you might pick up on holiday - on a beach in Wales, say. Its history, though, carries us into abyssal depths of time, and across the farthest reaches of space.

This is a narrative of…

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Earth

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Why read it?

2 authors picked The Planet in a Pebble as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Hettie Judah

Author

A whole book about a single stone? Whaaaaat?

Sure, The Planet in a Pebble is usually filed under ‘popular science’ but with a premise like that, we could also consider it a work of experimental literature.

Zalasiewicz picks up a pebble on a Welsh beach – humble, rounded grey slate intersected by a seam of white quartz – which starts him on a journey back over 4.5 billion years, looking at the minerals of early Earth.

We watch elements of our pebble progress through the rock cycle, eroding from igneous rock, slowly settling in a bacteria-rich bed of sediment within…

From Hettie's list on making you fall in love with stones.

Peter Macinnis

Author

I only ever picked up one year of geology in my first degree, but it was enough to send me off around the world in search of unusual rocks. Zalasiewicz, working on the pretty conceit of taking a single Welsh pebble, weighing about 50 grams, which will contain around a million million million million atoms, and then to see what we can learn of it, and its story.

This is totally accessible for the general reader, and full of quirky detail. Why not take an extremely long view of history, a 4.5-billion-year view?

From Peter's list on history and science.