2022 read #44: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte.

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of Their Lost World by Steve Brusatte

398 pages

Published 2018

Read from October 18 to October 20

Rating: 3 out of 5

Ah, 2018. Now that's a lost world. I remember strolling around Barnes & Noble, blissfully unaware of the potential civilization-killing pandemic then barely more than a year away, and stopping dead in my tracks when I saw this book on display. It had been a long time since the big Dinomania boom of the 1990s. Not many pop-science dinosaur books had been published since then, let alone aggressively promoted into bestsellerdom. I couldn't afford retail price books back then (and I really can't now, though I have enough wiggle room these days to go on the occasional discounted or used book splurge), but I came close to springing for this one.

I didn't, of course. And it's probably for the best that I didn't. I liked this book fine enough, I suppose, but I'm not its intended audience, and that dulled my enjoyment. Unlike later books that publishers snatched up to cash in on success of Rise and Fall -- titles like Beasts Before Us and Otherlands, two books I enjoyed tremendously -- this book doesn't trust its readers with grasping its subject. Rise is explicitly, perhaps even cynically, written for mass consumption, its ideal audience the sort of blandly curious reader who has somehow never touched a book on geology or evolution (or dinosaurs) since middle school. As popular science books go, it feels like a naked grab at bestsellerdom. And apparently it worked.

Like so many popular science titles these days, Rise spends much of its time giving pocket biographies of the cool characters of modern paleontology, all of whom happen to be great buddies of Brusatte's. Publishers love that "human interest" element, I suppose. The presentation of the actual science is hopelessly glib, employing banalities like "This was the real Jurassic Park" and shortening foraminafera to "forams" without ever giving the accepted (and not even that difficult) name. In a book already choked for space thanks to all the bios of Brusatte's rad buddies, there's an entire chapter on Tyrannosaurus rex. If you came for a new history of the dinosaurs' lost world, as I did, you'd be disappointed. If you were a casual reader who didn't know a thing about dinosaurs beyond the name T. rex, this would be the book for you.

More than anything, it feels like Brusatte used this book to position himself as our generation's go-to media paleontologist. The Millennial equivalent of Bob Bakker or John Horner: that one guy the newspapers know the name of and call up whenever they need a flavor quote, or that one guy who's the token expert in any documentary. If that was his goal, it seems to have succeeded admirably.