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Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Ever-Ending Earth
by
Craig Childs
The earth has died many times, and it always comes back looking different. In an exhilarating, surprising exploration of our planet, Craig Childs takes readers on a firsthand journey through apocalypse, touching the truth behind the speculation. Apocalyptic Planet is a combination of science and adventure that reveals the ways in which our world is constantly moving toward...more
Hardcover, 368 pages
Published
October 2nd 2012
by Pantheon
(first published October 1st 2012)
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Am excited to go to a reading by Craig Childs at Changing Hands in Tempe on October 15th, 7pm.
The fact that I went to see this author do a reading certainly adds to my experience of this book, but even if I were to ignore Child's excellent presentation, this book still gets 5 stars from me.
In Apocalyptic Planet: The story of the Everending Earth, Craig Childs looks at a series of planetary end scenarios. Each frightening and fascinating and most are events that have already happened on this planet at some point--asteroid strikes, super volcanos and the like. He describes the end scenari...more
In Apocalyptic Planet: The story of the Everending Earth, Craig Childs looks at a series of planetary end scenarios. Each frightening and fascinating and most are events that have already happened on this planet at some point--asteroid strikes, super volcanos and the like. He describes the end scenari...more
Apocalyptic Planet by Craig Childs is an ambitious work, spanning several continents and billions of years, and the author maintains an energetic tone that not only beckons the reader into the most mysterious places on Earth, but also warns to the cataclysms that may befall our precious world.
Part travel log and part science guidebook, Apocalyptic Planet is filled with wit, humor, and fascinating facts about the Earth as a living organism and a place filled with various landscapes of desolation...more
Part travel log and part science guidebook, Apocalyptic Planet is filled with wit, humor, and fascinating facts about the Earth as a living organism and a place filled with various landscapes of desolation...more
Back-pack porn? Perhaps. It certainly evoked the feeling of being on an outdoor adventure, as I vicariously lived it page by page, comfortably sitting on my commuter rail ass.
More, though, it's theme is perspective, and how difficult it is for us transient beings to fully appreciate geological Earth time (let alone MBTA time), and thus how we get our knickers in a twist over environmental change, however rapid it seems to us. Even he catches himself thinking of the now as a kind of "ending up" w...more
More, though, it's theme is perspective, and how difficult it is for us transient beings to fully appreciate geological Earth time (let alone MBTA time), and thus how we get our knickers in a twist over environmental change, however rapid it seems to us. Even he catches himself thinking of the now as a kind of "ending up" w...more
When I picked up this book, I had more than one list in my head of what to keep handy in the event of planetary catastrophe. I wrote letters and protested oil pipelines, nuclear containment wells miles deep in the earth, crabbed about congressmen who pay homage to robber barons, and vote to end life on earth as we know it routinely, like brushing their teeth or taking out the garbage. Well. Turns out earth can take care of herself, thank you very much. Not only earth, but the solar system and be...more
Not the kind of thing I typically choose to read, but my husband enjoys this author and he was a charming speaker at a Book Convention here in the Black Hills several years ago. I particularly enjoyed the chapter "Civilizations Fall" and only wish Childs had written more about these cultures that were once so mighty and are now so utterly gone.
I think the thing that pushed this book to a four star rating for me was the really unique way in which the author juxtaposed his musings on the upheavals that could end our civilization with descriptions of his travels in environments that mimic these upheavals on a smaller scale--the monoculture of a large Iowa farm, the tectonic majesty of a Tibetan river gorge, the blank ice fields of Greenland. It gave his work an immediacy that others lack.
Craig Child's is amazing. Part dare devil, part zen monk, and all scientist, his writing makes me smile, hold my breath, laugh, contemplate, and achieve a better understanding of our world and my place in it. He's the male counterpart to Teri Tempest Williams.
Amazing. I am by no means a hippie tree hugger, and I loathe the standard climate change disaster trope. However this book intrigued me with its promise of an outlook on geologic scale. It did deliver by nesting the concepts in adventure travel stories that simultaneously make you think "that was really stupid, wtf were you thinking" and "damn, that sounds awesome I wish could have been there with you." When you get thoroughly sucked into the travel story the author deftly weaves in the science...more
Amusing personal observations combined with statistics & the people who record them describing how we're doomed without being preachy about it, as it's happened before in the cyclical history of earth. I found myself fascinated.
This was a very interesting book about the author's adventures and musings as he traveled to desolate apocalyptic places all over the planet in order to gain a better understanding of how the earth has changed over the millennia.
A fun and fascinating book looking at nine different travels by the author to extreme environments, with much information about the relevant apocalyptic scenarios worked into the stories. Well-written and interesting to read.
Excellent! Childs' descriptions are precise, evocative, his prose, lush. I'm right there with him, can feel the heat on my head, cold in my face, the crunch under my boots. Travel writing with a difference!
Apr 05, 2013
Mills College Library
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550 C5371 2012
This was very fun. Makes me want to take geology & Earth science courses, then reroute my career to travel the world to explore and see and study microbes in extreme environments!
Not a doom-sayer book--realistic in his presentation. Craig is a good writer, too!
Not a doom-sayer book--realistic in his presentation. Craig is a good writer, too!
Written in the style of fictional adventure, the writer personally travels from the deserts in Peru to the melting ice sheets in Greenland, volcanoes and mountain peaks and everything in between to cover anything involving climate change. A wonderful ride!
occasionally overwritten, but full of awesome stuff
Oct 20, 2012
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A meditative diary of one hippie scientist's travels.
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CRAIG CHILDS is a commentator for NPR's Morning Edition, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Men's Journal, Outside, The Sun, and Orion. He has won numerous awards including the 2011 Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, 2008 Rowell Award for the Art of Adventure, the 2007 Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, and the 2003 Spirit of the West Award for his body of work.
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Apr 26, 2013 06:03pm