Customer Reviews:
 An impossible book to make simple, made simple February 22, 2007
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
If you spend your entire life investigating and writing the same theme it ought to be good, even if you are were a bit of a thicky. If you had a bit of nous it should be wonderful. This book is wonderful in the S. Johnson's definition of the word.
Lovelock's book is *very* easy to understand and beautifully illustrated with large pastel coloured graphics of a children's natural history book. It should appeal to the interested child too, even when they will not understand most of the text, they *will* understand the theme and by association "subliminally" get the learning.
I think I remember Lovelock saying in an interview, many years ago, that he learnt a lot about chemistry as a child even though he did not know what it all meant and it was *this* learning that was more significant, not the following university degree course "...you can't get that knowledge in just four years..."
If you were not too keen on chemistry, biology and geology because it was boring then you might find this book Quite-Interesting in the Steven Fry sense. I generally liked these things but was too lazy to learn them... until now that is: It is extremely interesting, now I know what a free-radical actually is!
Almost every page has some gem on it e.g. I laughed out loud when I read that oxygen is a carcinogen! It is so obvious - but I never realised it till that very moment :)
Another was our origin from Big Bang: every one of us contains 30,000 bequerels of radio active potassium - our very existance depends on nuclear fussion and fission - he puts things in perspective - And that is the biggest message of the book/idea/theory...
...or is it theorem? Gaia theory seems to me to be as near to theorem as it is possible to prove, in an impossible to prove situation.
Dawkins' attacks on Gaia are dealt with pleasantly using "Daisy World" as simple a model as could be; a child could understand it.
I like Dawkins, he is one of my favourite authors and he has a good grip on the science side of his subject but Lovelock is massively more in-perspective (and he explains DNA better).
 Not a perfect book, but a very important idea February 21, 2006
21 out of 22 found this review helpful
It is perhaps now hard to remember the impact of the ideas in this book when they were first published. These ideas were so influential on people's thinking that they have been absorbed into the discussion of the global environment. True, they are not universally accepted, indeed there are some who reject much of the thinking in the book. However, the core idea - of regarding the Earth as a single living organism, is so simple yet huge in scope that it touches all subsequent thinking. You can see this idea as a hard fact - a minority view, sometimes almost religious in intensity. Or you can see this idea as a useful metaphor for thinking about how the Earth responds to the good and bad of human actions - probably the more common view.So the Gaia theory, for all its flaws, should be read by serious folk as a key step in the development of thinking on the global environment. And, lets face it, no subject is more important.
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