Re: paleonet The Map That Changed the World

[Christopher Baldwin <baldwin@xxxxxxxx>]

There are plenty of reviews of this (a pair in the newsletter of the Geol. Soc of London that deal with Winchester's book and with the rival book on the same subject by John Morton.) Both get a bit of a mild panning! The New York Times and the British press (at least in the Daily Telegraph) have reviews.

My reading of both is that they both could have benefited from some careful editing by a "real" geologist - even a palaeontologis, no less! I think Winchester puffs himself up with a dedication to Harold Reading (a consummately gifted and knowledgeable editor of things geological) but I'm not sure from his book that he could have been much more than a Gentleman Geologist in his time at Oxford.

Still, despite their warts they at least do some good service for our discipline. I guess we have to accept the fact that they were not written for us.

Chris Baldwin

"Roy E. Plotnick" wrote:

 I have been reading Simon Winchester's The Map that Changed the World.  To be quite frank, I am coming to intensely dislike it.  Some samples:

• "What had hitherto been a signifier of drawing-room decorum seemed overnight to become the pastime of the dull, and then steadily evolve into what amateur paleontology is now: no more than the mark of the nerd."
• describing brachiopods: "The two shells, which were evidently hinged close to the anchor leg, opened slightly, and from between them flicked a long, curled, rubbery tonguelike organ, which waved among the suspended particles in the water, collected some of the edible morsels stuck to its surfaces, and was then coiled smartly back smartly between the shell, which promptly snapped shut."
• the glossary seems to defines brachiopods as bivalve molluscs!
• "Before the end of the Upper Carboniferous it was about to do away with the most attractively lovable lobsterlike Paleozoic arthropod known as the trilobite"

Has anyone seen/written a review of this book? -Roy
 

Roy E. Plotnick
Professor
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
University of Illinois at Chicago
845 W. Taylor St.
Chicago, IL 60607
plotnick@uic.edu
office phone: 312-996-2111     fax: 312-413-2279
lab phone: 312-355-1342
web page: http://www.uic.edu/~plotnick/plotnick.htm
"The scientific celebrities, forgetting their molluscs and glacial  periods, gossiped about art, while devoting themselves to oysters  and ices with characteristic energy.." -Little Women, Louisa  May Alcott

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