Life: an Unauthorized Biography

Copyright

Harper Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by Flamingo 1998

First published in hardback by HarperCollinsPublishers 1997

Copyright © Richard Fortey 1997

Fichard Fortey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006384205

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2010 ISBN: 9780007397648 Version: 2017-01-06

‘Fortey’s book is the tale of the evolution of animals and plants of all shapes and sizes, their invasion of land, continental drift, mass extinctions and the rise of mammals, including humans…Fortey says that Darwin’s view of the natural world informs his narrative as pervasively as grammar does a novel. His prose, like Darwin’s, is spare, confident and unadorned. As his impressive synthesis of evolution unfolds, a distant world is brought to life.’

Economist

‘Fascinating…This finely written book, by a scientist who wears his learning lightly, celebrates the procession of species that have swum, crawled and flown through our biosphere during its long history; we are truly the outcome of time and chance.’

MARTIN REES, Sunday Telegraph

‘Nimble, indefatigable, Fortey campaigns against the flattening effect the billion-year scale of his subject can have on imagination by keeping the human process of discovering the past always in sight. Wherever the calcium carbonate shell of a creature from the far past appears, so does the person who disentangled it from its rock and began to comprehend it…This marvellous book works as a biography of all of us (and, as he points out, all cauliflowers too) by an opinionated biographer whose eye for detail and analogy across a huge range of reference uncovers all kinds of intelligible unity for the reader.’

FRANCIS SPUFFORD, Evening Standard

‘Life: An Unauthorised Biography is a natural history of the first four thousand million years of life on earth, and is a great joy to read…What is appealing about this book is its all-embracing approach. Fortey’s narrative jumps from an obscure primeval mollusc to a piece of poetry, to an intellectual fashion; from an arid Australian desert to a quick walk in Charles Darwin’s garden and then back to the strange histories that are written in rocks…He writes powerfully and simply, and is, it seems, almost overwhelmed with a sense of beauty and intellectual excitement, and never-ending discovery.’

MINETTE MARTIN, Literary Review

‘For Fortey, the totality of earth-bound life is a subject ripe for biographical inquiry. The fact that his fascinating biography is ‘unauthorised’ is clearly a major aspect of its charm…Fortey is both extraordinarily well read and impressively international. He leads us in a dance through time that is enthralling…I will turn to this book again and again for its richness of detail. Its breadth and readability are complemented by the cohesiveness of its narrative, a happy characteristic lacking in nearly all current scientific writing…The geological facts summarised by Fortey make clear that all of us are embedded in this single continuous story of the earth’s surface. I strongly recommend you to read this book.’

LYNN MARGULIS, THES

‘Fortey’s love of the fossils that are his only access to the past is deep; his elegant writing communicates this feeling, especially when he writes of his own beloved trilobites…It is not just a skill; it can also be a profoundly moving experience. To look at a rock and see in it the intersection of a past world with the present one is a profound human triumph over time, a double vision that brings the vast scale of planetary processes into the realm of human experience. Fortey evokes some of this wonder as he takes fossils from present landscapes and puts them in their past places. At the same time, he whisks us through deserts to see the scars of glaciation, takes us along freezing shores to reveal sun-lit reefs. And his clear practical experience of the range of landscapes on offer today lends depth and authority to his recreations of landscapes past, such as the swamps of the Carboniferous…An excellently written and thoroughly informative book.’