1. Prologue: Genesis 2. Orbit 3. Ground (Why Earth?) 4. Scale (Barriers to Understanding) 5. Radiance (Earth's beauty) 6. Gravity (Earth's Pull) 7. Interlude: A Hike Around Piestewa Peak 8. Imagination List of Illustrations Notes Index
A literary scholar and a planetary scientist look at the Earth as object, viewed from the outside, and as a singular orb that is a challenge to scale and human self-importance.
Jeffrey Jerone Cohen is Dean of Humanities at Arizona State University, USA, and co-president of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. He is the author or editor of 13 books, including Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (which received the 2017 René Wellek Prize for best book in comparative literature). Linda T. Elkins-Tanton is Foundation Professor and Director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, USA. She is the author of a six-book series The Solar System (1st edition 2006; 2nd edition 2010) and co-editor, with A. Schmidt and K. Fristad, of Volcanism and Global Environmental Change (2015). Her articles have been published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Nature Geoscience, Nature, Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Astrophysical Journal, among other publications.
[An] alchemy of unlikely ideas ... [The authors] reflect on the
geological history of the earth and humanity's understanding of it
over the millennia.
*Sydney Morning Herald*
Earth is a magical, unusual, curious book … Cohen and Elkins-Tanton
describe it as a “little book about an impossibly large subject.”
This subject is made even larger by Cohen and Elkins-Tanton’s
forays into discussions of beauty, creativity, and imagination
(including my favorite question in the book: “Can you die from an
overactive imagination?”) and how they connect to science and
ultimately this planet. This makes Earth a book that is,
ultimately, a testament to what can be discovered if we are brave
enough to combine the unexpected.
*PopMatters*
Learning from this volume as a reader means … not only to
participate in a conversation between specialists from two
disciplines, but also to do so across different modes of
expression, and experimenting together with the two authors in an
innovative and completely unique creative space. Different readers
(and reviewers) will learn different things from this handsome (it
just about fits in an adult’s hand) and beautifully designed volume
… What surprised me was how ‘realistic’ the object lesson became
for me as a scholar because of the multiple narrative modes and
tones in which it is written. The fragmentary mix of subjective
impressions and scientific factoids all of us sedulously collect
before we force them into linear narratives are all discernible as
patterns in a rich and open ended fabric.
*Medievally Speaking*
Earth is ambitious, thought-provoking and inspirational,
conversationally written between two dissimilar but very
complementary viewpoints. In this great age of exoplanetary
discovery, it makes me wonder how unique our wonderful home planet
really is.
*Scott Parazynski, MD, University Explorer and Professor at Arizona
State University, USA, and NASA Astronaut (retired)*
As much as the mindsets of a distinguished planetary scientist and
a medieval studies professor differ, it is what they share in
common when thinking about that object so dear to all of us, the
Earth, that is so fascinating. What this delightful and informative
book ultimately demonstrates is that the humanity of science itself
offers untold fuel for the humanities to ponder our existence. The
Object of this book, the Earth, is at once more interesting and
better off because both of these scholars chose to write about
it.
*Lawrence M. Krauss, theoretical physicist and author of A Universe
from Nothing and The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far*
Gorgeous … The book’s words and images can’t quite banish scale’s
disorienting shifts, but interweaving planet-sized ideas with human
words and emotions opens doors … I’m struck not so much by the
disparity of [the authors’] fields as their shared curiosity and
commitment to generative and generous thinking.
*The Bookfish*
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