"Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstance to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, ultimately wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result--eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly--in you."
To me this book is an exemplary example of audience-directed writing.
That is really a sign of a great author I think when they can get your attention and keep you entertained when it is a subject you do not usually read up on or have interest in. I agree that he is good at directing his writing to the audience and I like all his details and descriptions.
ReplyDeleteI love books like this. Higher education aims toward specialization, but I think smart people ought to be conversant in all fields.
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing how many subjects Bryson can speak fluently. It's my personal goal to shirk specialization entirely and become a 21st century renaissance man.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like a really interesting book. I'm not a big fan of science, but it seems like the author is able to talk about a difficult subject in a way that all can understand.
ReplyDeleteBryson is flat out amazing. Have you read "A Walk in the Woods"? An entire novel on the Appalachian Trail. Seriously. And it's a can't-put-it-down page turner. This man could write an engaging, hilarious novel about a ball of yarn.
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