Life, Richard Fortey

This isn’t my favourite of Fortey’s books, possibly because I’ve read similar types of books by other writers before, so he isn’t bringing me a new subject I don’t expect to like in the same way as he was in his books about geology, or a key passion of his as in his book about trilobites (though trilobites have their place here, too, as you’d expect with Fortey). Still, I enjoy the way he writes and the way he draws together his themes, and this isn’t a bad book — it’s just that he and others have covered a lot of this ground before.

Actually, my favourite history-of-evolution type book is Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale. (When Dawkins sticks to science, he’s great. When he decides to comment on twitter, rarely so.) That’s just a quirk of the way he organises it, though, while Fortey’s method is a little less organised, lingering on things of special interest to him. Which is fine, but didn’t work so well for me in this case. That, and he doesn’t deal with DNA as much as I’d like, because that’s my special interest and not his.

Nonetheless, Fortey knows his stuff and how to make it enjoyable, though I think I can understand people who complain about his writing style not being easy — I tend to take it slow and savour it, myself.

Rating: 3/5