Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

In the last unit of my semester earth science class at an Orange County, California high school, I frequently come face to face with fundamentalist Christian views of the geological time scale. I'm told that the scale is a fiction made up to support the theory of evolution. I explain to my students that the pattern of strata and fossils that guided [and still guide] the building of the geological time scale is very real and exists independently of the explanation of the pattern. I explain that people like William 'Strata' Smith and others who followed him established that the pattern exists years before Charles Darwin convinced the scientific world that evolution happened. I don't want to kill their faith, but I won't lie to them. Now Simon Winchester has given us a book that I can hand to my students and say, "here's how William Smith figured it all out." In The Map That Changed The World, Simon Winchester [in a very British and somewhat hyperbolic fashion] tells engagingly of the life of William 'Strata' Smith, surveyor, self-taught geologist, and maker of the first geologic map. I've known of Smith since my days as a student geologist [I can't recall that my professors ever mentioned the great map; their emphasis was always on Smith's discovery of the principle of faunal succession, or as Winchester writes in the book, "In his opinion, he wrote, all the rocks that had been laid down as sediments at a particular time in a particular place are laid down in a way that has much the same characteristics, and most particularly just the same fossils, and always appear in the same vertical order, in the same stratagraphical order, no matter where they are found."], but Winchester takes the story of Smith way beyond the brief tales of the canal digger who was fascinated by fossils that are told in the typical college class. Smith has become an even bigger hero of mine now that I know of his struggles with the class distinctions found in England in the early 1800's and that he was all too human enough to have a problem sticking to a budget. I read the paperback since my signed first printing of the hardback is too beautiful to handle [the dust jacket of the hardback folds out into the geologic map of England and Wales that Smith made]. My only complaint, and it's a teenie tiny one, is that Winchester's hyperbolic writing style sometimes comes very close to crossing the line from biography into hagiography. I highly recommend The Map That Changed The World to anybody with an interest in geology, paleontology, cartography, history, England in the 1800's, or the ups and downs of a fascinating life. Get the hardback for the jacket, but read the paperback and then donate it to your local junior high, high school, or public library.