Illustrations by Sarah Gilman
244 pages
Published 2025
Read from December 4 to December 6
Rating: 3 out of 5
My perennial wish: more pop science books intended for people who are well-versed in the basics and want something more.
Strata is not that book. In her prologue, Poppick writes that she intends this book for folks who maybe haven’t thought about rocks before — an introduction to Deep Time to get more people to engage with the geology, and the world, around them. Noble, especially in our dismal age of anti-intellectualism. But it’s a bummer that this is the majority of what popular science has to offer as a genre.
Poppick does the science journalist thing of interviewing colorful experts, spending a significant chunk of the text sketching personalities via anecdotes of fieldwork or risky bush piloting. I get why human interest stories are so prominent, given the tastes of the audience. It’s also good to contextualize scientists as human beings, especially when we consider the history of white men excluding everyone else from science for so long (and pressuring other demographics out of the field to this day). I want more than that, though.
Clearly, what I want is something closer to a college textbook. Which isn’t the fault of this book in particular, but rather the nonfiction publishing market at large.
Poppick unpacks four broad “stories”: the oxygenation of the atmosphere; the Cryogenian; the rise of terrestrial plants and, with them, mud; and the thermal maxima of the Mesozoic. Each of these is investigated with an eye toward a better understanding of our current moment of global catastrophe. If it helps even a handful of people understand the perils of the present through an appreciation of the past, I’ll count this book as a success.
As one scientist she interviews says, “[P]eople could be more happy if they spent more time looking at rocks.” I can’t argue with that.
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