Either I’m over two months late in writing this little blog post, or else I am 9.5 months early (only 292 shopping days left). You pick. I’ll take the latter.
At Christmas I’m generally the kind of guy who’s happy with some new wool socks, a glass of egg nog, and watching the kids play. This year, however, by far my favorite gift has been a book entitled “Natural History: The Ultimate Visual Guide to Everything on Earth” given to me by my lovely wife. This book is completely epic. It was put together with help from the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History. And it is stunning. Just plain stunning. There is not a page of this book that you can turn to where you won’t be completely amazed by the amazing diversity, color, and various facts about life (and other things) on earth. If you want to see for yourself, head over to the Amazon page for the book; there are a few sample pages there.
“Natural History” covers everything that you can imagine; the claim of “everything on earth” is not far off of the mark. There are excellent sections on evolutionary and geological history. There are impressive phylogenetic trees (the details of which I’m sure everyone will argue about). There are well-written essays about large-scale topics, and there are pages and pages and pages and pages of stunning photography. The book covers minerals, rocks, fossils, archaea, bacteria, protists, plants of all types, and a ton of animals. If it resides on our planet and you can imagine it, it – or one of its close representatives – is there. Besides the many pages covered in photographs and facts, there are also focus pages that feature one particular species of interest. One of the really amazing things about this book, if you think about it, is that even as massive a tome as it is, it doesn’t come close to covering what we know about the world, let alone what we don’t know or don’t even know that we don’t know.
And yes, this is a massive book. It’s not the sort of thing that you can comfortably read while sprawled on the sofa. Nor is it written to encourage linear reading, which is a good thing because the size would be prohibitive. I like to think of it as a nightly trip to a fantastic museum, and indeed, upon entering its front door I feel as though I’m browsing around the Smithsonian. I tend to open it up either randomly or to some group or topic that I happen to be interested in, and just see where my reading leads me. Each “specimen” has a short blurb of information associated with it. Often those little bits of information have prompted me to do a bit of deeper digging (PDF) on things that catch my eye, and in that way this book has taken me on some really interesting trips into nature.
Winter is coming to an end here in the northern hemisphere, and we’re all going to get out a bit more in the coming months. All of the animals and plants that we love will be making their annual reappearance. I’m guessing that my copy of this book will see a bit of an hiatus in use over the next while, but it has been a great companion during these past winter months, reminding me of all of the life that’s been sleeping under the snow and waiting to greet me soon.