As the first geology book I've read, I found it quite interesting -- even if I wasn't convinced that even with the qualification this sentence could possibly be true: "perhaps the discipline best prepared to lead science into the holistic world of the twenty-first century."
Part of what makes the book so interesting is that it takes you down the cul-de-sacs recounting the promising leads and techniques that did not pan out. The best chapter for this was “Iridium” about how the author and his colleagues discovered a layer of iridium at multiple sites around the world at the KT boundary that established that a giant asteroid or comet hit earth 65 million years ago.
Given that the book was published in 1997 it is not exactly up-to-date or cutting edge. But it is an interesting history of science and an introduction to some basic issues in the geology of crater impacts and other issues – not to mention the extinction of the dinosaurs, which given the geological perspective mostly gets short shrift. ( )
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Part of what makes the book so interesting is that it takes you down the cul-de-sacs recounting the promising leads and techniques that did not pan out. The best chapter for this was “Iridium” about how the author and his colleagues discovered a layer of iridium at multiple sites around the world at the KT boundary that established that a giant asteroid or comet hit earth 65 million years ago.
Given that the book was published in 1997 it is not exactly up-to-date or cutting edge. But it is an interesting history of science and an introduction to some basic issues in the geology of crater impacts and other issues – not to mention the extinction of the dinosaurs, which given the geological perspective mostly gets short shrift. (