Otherlands

A World in the Making

Otherlands
Thomas Halliday
RRP:
NZ$ 50.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 40.00
Hardback
h240 x 162mm - 416pg
1 Feb 2022 UK
International import eta 7-19 days
9780241405741
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
From a dazzling young palaeontologist and prodigiously talented writer comes the Earth as we' ve never seen it beforeWhat would it be like to experience the ancient landscapes of the past as we experience the reality of nature today? To actually visit the Jurassic or Cambrian worlds, to wander among their spectacular flora and fauna, to witness their continental shifts? In Otherlands, the multi-talented palaeontologist Thomas Halliday gives us a breath-taking up close encounter with worlds that are normally unimaginably distant. Journeying backwards in time from the most recent Ice Age to the dawn of complex life itself, and across all seven continents, Halliday immerses us in sixteen lost ecosystems, each one rendered with a novelist' s eye for detail and drama. Every description - whether the colour of a beetle' s shell, the shambling rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air - is grounded in fact. We visit the birthplace of humanity on the shores of the great lake Lonyumun, in Pliocene-era Kenya; in the Miocene, we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the world has ever known as it fills the evaporated Mediterranean Sea; we encounter forests of giant fungus nine metres tall in Devonian-era Scotland; and we gaze at the light of a full and enormous moon in the Ediacaran sky, when life hasn' t yet reached land. To read Otherlands is to time travel, to see the last 550 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fantastical and familiar.
The best book on the history of life on Earth I have ever read -- Tom Holland, author of DOMINION Thomas Halliday' s debut is a kaleidoscopic and evocative journey into deep time. He takes quiet fossil records and complex scientific research and brings them alive - riotous, full-coloured and three-dimensional. You' ll find yourself next to giant two-metre penguins in a forested Antarctica 41 million years ago or hearing singing icebergs in South Africa some 444 million years ago. Maybe most importantly, Otherlands is a timely reminder of our planet' s impermanence and what we can learn from the past -- Andrea Wulf, author of THE INVENTION OF NATURE Deep time is very hard to capture - even to imagine - and yet Thomas Halliday has done so in this fascinating volume. He wears his grasp of vast scientific learning lightly; this is as close to time travel as you are likely to get -- Bill McKibben, author of FALTER An absolutely gripping adventure story, exploring back through the changing vistas of our own planet' s past. Earth has been many different worlds over its planetary history, and Thomas Halliday is the perfect tour guide to these past landscapes, and the extraordinary creatures that inhabited them. Otherlands is science writing at its very finest -- Lewis Dartnell, author of ORIGINS Full of wonder and fascination, exquisitely written, this is time travel of spectacular dimensions - a journey into our planet' s evolution and the world in which we live. A compellingly important read -- Isabella Tree, author of WILDING Otherlands is one of those rare books that' s both deeply informative and daringly imaginative. It will change the way you look at the history of life, and perhaps also its future -- Elizabeth Kolbert, author of THE SIXTH EXTINCTION This stunning biography of our venerable Earth, detailing her many ages and moods, is an essential travel guide to the changing landscapes of our living world. As we hurtle into the Anthropocene, blindly at the helm of this inconstant planet, Halliday gives us our bearings within the panorama of deep time. Aeons buckle under his pen: the world before us made vivid; the paradox of our permanence and impermanence visceral. Wonderful -- Gaia Vince, author of TRANSCENDENCE
Thomas Halliday is an Associate Research Fellow at the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Birmingham. His PhD won the Linnean Society Medal for the best thesis in the biological sciences in the UK, and he won the Hugh Miller Writing Competition in 2018. He was raised in Rannoch in the Scottish Highlands, and now lives in London with his family.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780241405741
Published: 1 Feb 2022
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: Allen Lane
Publisher: Penguin Books
Format: Hardback
Height: 240mm
Width: 162mm
Spine: 37mm
Weight: 648g
Pages: 416

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