Richard Fortey’s Dry Storeroom No. 1; the Secret Life of the Natural History Museum was absolutely brilliant! His Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution was eye-opening as well extraordinarily informative. And while Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms; the Story of the Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind, interesting as it was, did perhaps wander off along tangents a bit more at times than might have been desirable, his Earth; An Intimate History and Life; a Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth are as entertaining as they are educational, and both most certainly belong on the shelf of any naturalist worth his or her field kit.
This coming December, Dr. Fortey’s most recent book, The Wood for the Trees; One Man’s Long View of Nature, will see publication in the U.S. Already available in the U.K. and Canada, this new book sees the author describing what he has found on his four acres in the Chiltern Hills of Oxfordshire and what can be interpreted about the larger ecological systems of our planet from these discoveries.
