 | Price Comparisons: Rental | | Sorry, the textbook you were looking for is not available as Rental, at any of the stores we searched. | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com A penetrating, page-turning tour of a post-human Earth In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman offers an utterly original approach to questions of humanity’s impact on the planet: he asks us to envision our Earth, without us. In this far-reaching narrative, Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; which everyday items may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe. The World Without Us reveals how, just days after humans disappear, floods in New York’s subways would start eroding the city’s foundations, and how, as the world’s cities crumble, asphalt jungles would give way to real ones. It describes the distinct ways that organic and chemically treated farms would revert to wild, how billions more birds would flourish, and how cockroaches in unheated cities would perish without us. Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders from rabbis to the Dali Lama, and paleontologists---who describe a prehuman world inhabited by megafauna like giant sloths that stood taller than mammoths---Weisman illustrates what the planet might be like today, if not for us. From places already devoid of humans (a last fragment of primeval European forest; the Korean DMZ; Chernobyl), Weisman reveals Earth’s tremendous capacity for self-healing. As he shows which human devastations are indelible, and which examples of our highest art and culture would endure longest, Weisman’s narrative ultimately drives toward a radical but persuasive solution that needn't depend on our demise. It is narrative nonfiction at its finest, and in posing an irresistible concept with both gravity and a highly readable touch, it looks deeply at our effects on the planet in a way that no other book has. |
Average Customer Rating:   The World Without Us It has a lot of information that is interesting, yet boring at the same time. Probably will not finish reading it. Or will skim quickly through it to get to the end.
Quality of the book was good. Details but not depth Although I liked the writing style, and the topic of the book, I felt that at times that the author approach of the book was mistaken. We have a lot of technical detail of what the process specifically entails (what HAPPENS when we are not here), but the philosophical discussion (what happens WHEN WE ARE NOT HERE)was lacking. Obviously the author has the right to decide the approach of his book, it's just that I was expecting something more than an enumeration of facts. Also the "purpose" of the book, that is to make us understand the importance of our environment and how bad we are at managing it, sometimes impinged into the quality of the writing.
Overall a good read, that I wish could have been great. A Whirlwind Spacetime Tour of a Complex World (Both With and Without Us) Alan Weisman is a very skilled writer with a novelist's ability to easily evoke vivid imagery and spin out engrossing stories, and he uses this ability to create many detailed portraits of the world both with and without us, ranging through the past, present, and future. These portraits come together to form a fairly vast mosaic filling a large book. As a result, the book goes well beyond the catchy and somewhat enigmatic title.
To create these portraits, Weisman has clearly done his homework (including plenty of field research) and he conveys a huge amount of information spanning natural sciences (especially biology), engineering, technology, prehistory, history, and cultural anthropology. I did spot some inaccuracies in my areas of expertise, but they're not egregious enough to represent fatal flaws. Moreover, predictions involving any complex system are usually going to involve substantial uncertainty, even when they come from 'experts', so one has to take all of the forecasting in the book with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, I do think that the general contours of Weisman's presentation are reliable, even if some details and specific predictions are somewhat off the mark.
The nature of this book inherently prevents meaningfully summarizing it, but one can reasonably ask what policy conclusions can/should be drawn from the book. Weisman generally avoids offering such conclusions, which I initially found frustrating, thus tempting me to drop my rating to four stars on the basis of incompleteness. I felt like "you're telling me all this interesting stuff, but what's your point?" But by the end of the book, I felt that Weisman had probably chosen the wiser course in not offering conclusions, since opinions on this can vary widely for a lot of reasons, plus readers should make the effort to reach their own conclusions anyway.
Even if we can't summarize the details of the book or agree on policy conclusions, perhaps we can at least abstract out some general principles? Here's my attempt (with apologies for stating the obvious):
1. The world, especially the biosphere, is a complex system which has always been changing and will continue to do so, with or without the presence of humans.
2. We humans are almost surely causing another mass extinction which may eventually take us with it. But some life will still survive after us, and will likely once again gradually rise in biomass and biodiversity.
3. If humans suddenly disappear, the various parts of the manmade world will disintegrate at widely varying rates, ranging from days to millions of years.
4. One can imagine a future human existence which transcends our current form of physical embodiment, but this strikes me as a fantasy which will never (and perhaps could never) come to fruition unless one brings in a spiritual perspective.
5. Speaking of spirituality, we need to consider the implications of life on this planet being completely incinerated as the sun expands within about 5 billion years. Assuming that humans won't manage to colonize another part of the universe, our ultimate physical demise raises (yet again) the profound questions of why this world exists, why humans are here, what we're supposed to be doing while we're here, our relationship to other species, and whether physical obliteration would truly be the end of our existence. Convincing answers seem remarkably elusive, yet these questions continue to impose themselves (at least for me).
Overall, I think this a uniquely powerful book, and it certainly gave me a lot to think about, so I recommend it to any reflective person. At the very least, this book is an excellent antidote to becoming mired in a narrow "daily grind" perspective on life. The bigger picture is always there, and this book will help awaken you to it. Not sure what to do ... I started the book with good intentions, being your average, every-day environmentally conscious person. But I just couldn't bring myself to finish it. The book had interesting new details, such as the primitive forest at Belarus that I'd never heard about before. But once I got half way through, and started reading about how devastatingly bad the plastic pollution of our planet has become, I just couldn't read any more. I like to keep up with news of the environment, but there's only so much you can take in without becoming truly depressed about the state we're in. Maybe it's a naive attitude to take, but I prefer to revert back to a blissfully ignorant human being occasionally and think happier thoughts. Full of fascinating information, but I doubt it's something I'll ever pick up again. Too long, irrelevant, boring I heard Alan interviewed on NPR and that interview was more interesting than this book. The writing is too journalistic, lacking in flow, and has a tripped up kind of feel. Too wordy, too embellished, too descriptive... I just wanted a good picture of this world we think we are going to get a picture of, but Alan simply goes from place to place, placing way too much weight on boring descriptions of people he meets and landscapes, and you hardly feel like you get a good idea of what this world without us looks like. I did find some of it interesting, but I think this book could have been a long article and been more effective without all of the verbose garbage.
Another major point I hated: Alan is a sucker for all of the global warming propaganda, and he is so convinced that we are responsible for the earth warming up. He stresses this way too often. The book is a couple years old now, but the last few years have cooled down enough to wipe away many more years of the warming trend. The earth has always gone through warming and cooling phases, and humans used to be afraid of another ice age just a few decades ago. Alan proves his mainstream-herd-mentality-mind by going along with the ignorant masses on this global warming garbage, apparently unaware that CO2 lags temperature by an 800 year interval, and it is temperature which causes CO2 levels to fluctuate, not the other way around.
There was some interesting material in this book. It was just way too verbose and too long, and too many chapters should have been left out. Just because you travel somewhere doesn't mean you have to write an entire chapter about it. |  |
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