Fascinating. Enlightening. And, just as the author intended, I assume, frightening, as it chronicles the fragility of life and how long-established eco-systems can so easily be wiped off the face of the Earth.

As Brannen promises in his introduction, his snapshots of Earth history cover a timeline "vast beyond comprehension and, in some exceedingly rare moments, tragic beyond words."

Brannen is very good at creating a very real, visceral connection to events that happened so very long ago. In one aside, he manages to transform a track of dinosaur fossil footprints into a little window to long-ago " ... moments of indecision recorded here in the rock -- whims and lost trains of thoughts in the skulls of these unspeakably ancient animals as they prowled the shore."

I think Brannen is also excellent at relating all this to the events we see unfolding, now, as we watch a new mass extinction event unfold around us, in slow motion. I didn't feel as if he was fear-mongering: just presenting the options of what we might be able to do, to pull back from the destruction that our species has wrought on the planet, in a blink of geological time. And where, like the dinosaurs and the other unbelievably old creatures that came before them, and fell victim to the natural processes of the planet, we are only temporary tenants, and like them, we are just going to go along for the ride.

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