Five Billion Years of Global Change
"...a dazzling intellectual journey that has the potential to alter profoundly the ways in which we think about our planet, human history, and our own lives. The book depicts an intricately interwoven physical reality at a multiplicity of scales, from aeons to nanosecond, from cosmos to the subatomic. Commanding a prodigious range of knowledge, Denis Wood writes in a captivating style all his own." --Wilbur Zelinsky, Department of Geography (Emeritus), The Pennsylvania State University "This book offers a deep meditation on the relation between place and time as the environments in which we live. Not since Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach has a single text presented a thesis at once so radical and completely formed. Every section overturns popular preconceptions. Time and again, what at first seems an absurd statement becomes fully evident a few pages later. It is this type of inversion of the common wisdom that makes the book an important delight. Readers of Wood's earlier work will not be disappointed: Five Billion Years of Global Change does for environmental studies and natural history what The Power of Maps did for cartography."--Tom Koch, author and adjunct professor, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Canada "This inspiring book bursts into the emerging field of ‘Big History'--history writ across all time, from the Big Bang to today--with an exhilarating style and sweep that should put it at the top of the genre. Cosmologist of the quotidian, geographer of Earth's grandest processes, Wood takes us from the Initial Instant through the earth's formation, life's beginnings, continents' shiftings, civilizations' risings and fallings, and on to our own contemporary habitations on the land. A bold, original, and visionary work."--Kent Mathewson, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University "Wood's conversational style and knack for storytelling helps him take a mammoth and potentially overwhelming subject...and make it enjoyable for almost any audience....This book would be a pleasant read for those with a basic science background and a curiosity about humanity's connection to the land....Environmental professionals with interdisciplinary degrees would find this book particularly intriguing. It's light enough for casual reading, but also contains the 'facts and figures' that make it a valid information source for students and professionals." --Environmental Practice "For the cause of understanding global change processes, Wood takes the power of words and forms a new, arousing, and persuasive language for the topic. Wood manages to compile the most important results from the respective fields in an exemplary interdisciplinary way. His book broadens the horizon of specialists while at the same time offering a compilation of the literature and scientific environmental thinking for an interested general audience."--H-Net Review
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