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Dec 17, 2009

I began this book, a careful extrapolation of what might happen to the world if humanity up and disappeared, about three weeks ago. I enjoyed it, for many reasons delineated in the positive reviews below and in raves in various press outlets. But a hundred pages in, I got caught up in other things.

I finished it while on the plane rushing Eastward, about three hours after I'd heard that my father had unexpectedly had a heart attack. So forgive this mordant self-indulgence, but I re More...

10 comments like (24 people liked it)

Sep 15, 2007

Mateo rated it:

Yeah, what you've heard about this book is true: It really is very good, very scary, very depressing--AND it's written entirely in Spurdlish, a language I just made up that consists only of the letter 't'.

If it only enabled fire ants to slowly liquify Dick Cheney, it would be perfect.

Okay, I'm kidding about the Spurdlish, but, yeah, great book. Weisman doesn't just speculate on what happens to your house or the NYC subways or the pyramids once we've all been raptured More...

0 comments like (13 people liked it)

Mar 21, 2010

Colin rated it:

In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman attempts to answer the question of what would happen to the earth if, for whatever reason, humans were to completely disappear tomorrow. While it’s a fascinating premise, one that Weisman undoubtedly put a lot of time and effort into, the execution falters. Inevitably, it’s hard to stretch what was initially a short essay into a full book, but that’s how The World Without Us got going. Structurally, the book is broken down into four parts with chapters discu More...

7 comments like (11 people liked it)

Dec 11, 2007

Shannon rated it:

This is one of the most amazing books I've ever read. I simply can't get over how fantastic, informative, well-written, and mind-opening it is. Wow, where do I start?

The book revolves around the hypothetical question: What would happen if all humans disappeared tomorrow? Would anything we created survive? Would anything miss us?

The short answer is: very little, not really. It's a blow to our ego perhaps, but true nevertheless. The only creatures who are dependent on us fo More...

4 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jun 20, 2010

Jennifer (aka EM) rated it:

An astonishing book, and the first piece of non-fiction that I've read in quite some time that has had the emotional power of a novel. The first comment I'll make has to do with that: Weisman's voice is a powerful one. He knows how to marshall the facts but also how to keep the story moving, and most importantly, get the reader engaged at an emotional as well as intellectual level.

Weisman's research seemed incredibly solid, but the book never felt plodding or laden down with eye- More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Dec 18, 2007

Glenn rated it:

I came across this book on a jaunt around the web, and, I suspect like most people, thought “what an amazing idea!” The only question I had in hearing about it was whether the writing in the book would live up to its premise.

It does, effortlessly. There is real, unforced poetry in Alan's writing, lines like “Rills lined with yellow asters flow soundlessly across spongy, hummocked meadows, so rain-logged that streams appear to float,” and, in a wonderful description of a famous mo More...

0 comments like (8 people liked it)

Jan 04, 2011

Osho rated it:

Weisman's enjoyable and hard-to classify thought experiment takes as its starting point the question, what would happen to the world if all humans were to disappear suddenly, simultaneously, and not cataclysmically? Weisman attempts to answer this from many perspectives in relation to architecture, nuclear waste, animal life, and global warming, to name a few. He musters support from a variety of fields and includes both data and interviews in his exploration. The intent of the fantasy, of cours More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jan 01, 2012

Becky rated it:

This book has been on my wishlist for quite a while, so when I was able to get the audio edition, I didn't hesitate to dive right in. I will say that this is not the best audiobook I've ever heard. The reader, Adam Grupper, was a bit stiff at times, but that's really my only complaint.

I think that this is one that I will have to read again myself at some point, because I feel like it's one that I would need to really take my time with, and absorb. This was so fascinating to me, and More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Mar 01, 2008

James rated it:

This is a good book.

Not a great book, but a good book.

As a humbling, interesting book about Our World and the incompatibility of our Current Society with Ecology, it belongs on your shelf next to Guns, Germs, and Steel, An Inconvenient Truth, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. And there is plenty to keep your eyes wide open in horror at our existence’s lack of harmony with the environment. Like the frightening petrochemical monstrosity that is Houston, Texas. Yeehaw!!!

This More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Nov 09, 2007

P. rated it:

I wanted to like this book, I really did. Not only was it given to me by my new uncle, but it ostensibly dealt with a subject that I have spent some time thinking about (usually during periods of outdoor solitude such as when walking to or from work) -- the decay of human structures and how they might be co-opted by nature if they were abandoned.

Unfortunately, rather than dealing primarily with scientific, archaeological or anthropological observations about the resilience of huma More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Nov 22, 2007

Sarah rated it:

I just demoted this book from four-star status to three-star status. I started reading it and then had to give it back to the library before I was done and then I had to get it back to read the last chapter. At the risk of being platitudinous, this book is no fine wine.

The literary world is definitely instep with our current go-green zeitgeist and, as past president of Earlham's Environmental Action Committee and as someone whose economic footprint is minimal, I am quite pleased. Tha More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Jun 16, 2008

Marcus rated it:

I enjoyed the premise, but the execution was a snoozer. I'm not sure if it was the author's soporific style, or that I was let down by his overly repetitive rundown on floral succession: "asparagus and trumpet vine take hold as dingleberries and snorfle-weed provide shade..." Over and over; it felt like the author was attempting to display the fact that he did thorough investigation with environmental biologists and was flexing his bio street cred, After the first 4 times, the rema More...

1 comment like (8 people liked it)

Apr 04, 2008

Jesse rated it:

I learned of this book from the "fact" rich radio show CoastToCoastAM with George Noorey. Although George's usual guests are crystal rubbing muppets from Xenon this guest actually wrote an interesting book. I have to wonder if the author even knew what radio show he was on.

The book describes the impermanence of humanity's impact on the globe. Long after we are gone their will still be mountains of plastic but even this will be absorbed or degraded into nothingness. Tim More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 20, 2008

Kelly rated it:

An intriguing thought experiment of how the earth and life on it continues if humans only suddenly disappeared, and not in some cataclysmic way that wipes out other life on earth. Of course to contemplate the world without us requires an investigation of the world with us--plastics, refineries, nuclear power plants, CO2, subways and skyscrapers, invasive species, pets, etc.

I approached this book with a geologist's perspective of time scale, and our ability to find discrete and obscu More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Sep 29, 2007

Matthew rated it:

I had to stop several times in the middle of reading this, to digest the chapters and pick something lighter up temporarily. Its not depressing in the way a sad novel is, but its upsetting in the way it really drives home how much humans have fucked the world up. The sacry thing about the book is that when reading about how humans have dissappeared and nature reclaims her property, I'm not thinking 'how terrible', I'm thinking 'how wonderful'. I've pulled back from the brink of thinking of human More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Sep 22, 2007

Shira rated it:

Ok, even though this book is a bestseller and many people seem to think it is so great and so deep, I found it to be very repetitive and not necessarily that well-written. I read this for my environmental book group, and probably would not have picked up such a depressing book on my own.

The basic idea is kind of interesting -- how would nature respond if people suddenly disappeared from the earth? Would the damage we caused to the environment be corrected? It's kind of a novel c More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 13, 2008

David rated it:

It's located on the 'mind-numbingly-boring' shelf for a reason. Whatever point the author is trying to make certainly doesn't support 300 pages of impenetrable prose. After five false starts I managed to get to page 50 before finally giving up in disgust.

All the people who have made this a best-seller? I don't believe for a moment that they have actually read it. This is not a book to read, though it may be one to impress your friends with by pretending to have read it.

D More...

4 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 05, 2008

Jack rated it:

Cats rule and dogs are toast.

After reading an article that Alan Weisman had written for Harpers, “describing how when humans fled Chernobyl, nature rushed in to fill our void,” Discover magazine editor Josie Glausiusz asked Weisman a simple question: “What would happen if humans disappeared everywhere?" Instantly intrigued, Weisman agreed to write an article for Discover that allows us to remove Earth’s dominant species from the planet, then sit back and watch what happens next More...

0 comments like

Jan 21, 2008

Kerri rated it:

Weisman's fascinating thought experiment takes readers from earth's deepest past into the farthest future imaginable. I was particularly interested in his research on population growth and the ability of nature to bounce back after not only the elimination of humans, but a reduction in worldwide human population. You will be surprised by just how resilient nature can be. A great read for the environmentally minded and for anyone who can put ego aside and envision a world without us.

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Jul 11, 2011

Simon rated it:

Imagining that all humans on earth suddenly disappeared, Alan Weisman asks whether the world would miss us, how it would change in our absence, and what mankind’s legacy might be. In answering these questions Weisman offers an impressive and incredibly broad ranging discussion, from ecology, natural history and evolution, through engineering, climate science and nuclear technology. Unsurprisingly, much of the discussion focuses on the depressingly large number of ways in which we have poisoned More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 01, 2009

Patrick rated it:

Some people reviewed this book like they were expecting a disaster movie—almost disappointed there weren’t horrific scenes to titillate the prurient side of us all. Not this book—although I felt a little voyeuristic on some of the moments of decay brilliantly described on this book.
I am a ruins junkie. I admit it. Even before I moved west where ruins of past cultures abound at every turn, I was fascinated by abandoned barns, houses, factories—you name it. If it had been left to decay away, More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 18, 2008

Julianne rated it:

According to Bill McKibben, “This is one of the grandest thought experiments of our time, a tremendous feat of imaginative reporting,” and I agree with that characterization, minus the hyperbole. In "The World Without Us," Alan Weisman asks us to “picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow” (4), whether as a result of an unspeakably efficient virus, a religious rapture, or alien kidnapping. The cause really doesn’t matter, because Weisman’s focus isn’t on us: it’s on More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 11, 2008

Juushika rated it:

What would happen to the world if, sometime in the immediate future, without a catastrophe that damaged the planet, every human on Earth were to disappear? This is the premise of The World Without Us, which explores the effect of man's absence across the the world: the swift disintegration of homes and cities, the long-lasting effects of pollution and plastic, the health and death of flora and fauna. The topic is interesting and eye-opening, but the book leaves something to be desired. The narra More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 09, 2008

Andrew rated it:

You know how tourists are always complaining about other tourists? They all wish that they, and only they, were allowed to see the natural world unspoiled and uninterrupted. As though the presence of anyone else diminishes their own appreciation of the world, to which they alone have a natural right. Hell, we all do it. “The World Without Us” fills a niche created by this kind of attitude, and it does so extremely well. What would the world be like if humans were to disappear entirely? By More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 17, 2008

Mike rated it:

I felt the percentage of scienciness in the book could have been a little higher, especially chemistry. I mean, what happens to every polymer, resin, toxin, and film we have created over the past 100 years? I suppose this could have moved the book into a specific niche that would have diminished his intended scope. I understand that it was a mass appeal type thing, but especially towards the end I feel like the chapters were getting more and more broad with less and less detail. I think the b More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 23, 2008

TonyAlmeida rated it:

Um bom livro que está longe de ser um excelente exercício especulativo sobre como se desenvolveria o mundo, em particular toda a biosfera, se de repente toda a espécie humana simplesmente desaparecesse da terra. Apenas uma condição para o "desaparecimento" de todas as pessoas: este não poderia ser apocalíptico, ou seja, todas as estruturas construídas pelo Homem ficariam intactas, sujeitas a todos os agentes climatéricos e ao desenvolvimento natural da flora e da fauna. O que acontecer More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 13, 2008

Ceridwen rated it:

Oh man. The current imagination seems to run to the post-apocalyptic these days: I am Legend, any Romero film, World War Z, The Road. They imagine the last days of humanity in loneliness or zombies. This book leapfrogs over that to a time post-human. What have we wrought that will survive for a day, a year, one million years? It's fascinating.

Weisman trots the globe checking out places where humans have abandoned a patch of land for one reason or another: Cypress, Chernobyl, the DM More...

2 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jan 29, 2008

Steve rated it:

What would happen if humanity -- and just humanity -- disappeared tomorrow? What would happen to the world? What would happen to all the things that we've made and built and dumped and thrown away? What would happen to the plants and animals we've moved about, rearranged, bred, or brought along by accident (the roach, for example, often cited as indestructible, is actually very dependent on warm human buildings and running water for its existence across most of the globe)?

This book a More...

0 comments like

Jan 28, 2008

Frank rated it:

In the Acknowledgments section at the end of the book, Alan Weisman notes that "As a boy I'd always planned to be a scientist, though I could never figure out what kind, because everything interested me." This far-reaching and multifarious book bears that statement out. At times it seemed unfocused and arbitrarily organized, but I didn't mind very much, because it was usually so fascinating.

The parts of the book I'd heard about had to do with what would happen to our citie More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 27, 2009

Christina Stind rated it:

"Without us, Earth will abide and endure; without her, however, we could not even be."
This is how Alan Weisman ends his book. For me, it was scary reading to see how much we have destroyed earth - and how long it will take it to heal itself. I knew it was bad - but this book made me realize just how bad it is. The amounts of plastics for instance, in our oceans - and how the ocean slowly grinds it down to smaller and smaller pieces so that smaller and smaller animals can eat it a More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)