Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party
How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World
- Auteur: Edward Dolnick (Verenigde Staten)
- Soort boek: geschiedenisboek
- Taal: Engels
- Uitgever: Scribner
- Verschijnt: 6 augustus 2024
- Omvang: 352 pagina’s
- Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
- Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol
Edward Dolnick Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party recensie en review
- “Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party got at three major concepts I feel like we often take for granted … life is very, very old, almost incomprehensibly old; extinction is a reality; and evolution is a reality tied to extinction. It’s also cut up and retold in such a way that it’s great for the beach—you can read a chapter or two, jump in the ocean, come back out, pick up where you left off.” (NPR’s Science Friday)
- “Offers a wealth of context … These include forays into historical astronomy and philosophy, as well as contemporary science, and their sum creates a lively and engrossing narrative … Dolnick is evidently at home in this subject, and he succeeds in creating an engagingly broad story.” (Science)
Flaptekst van het nieuwe boek van de Amerikaanse historicus Edward Dolnick
From the bestselling author of The Clockwork Universe and The Writing of the Gods, a historical adventure story about the eccentric Victorians who discovered dinosaur bones, leading to a whole new understanding of human history.
In the early 1800s the world was a safe and cozy place. But then a twelve-year-old farm boy in Massachusetts stumbled on a row of fossilized three-toed footprints the size of dinner plates—the first dinosaur tracks ever found. Soon, in England, Victorians unearthed enormous bones—bones that reached as high as a man’s head. No one had ever seen such things. Outside of myths and fairy tales, no one had even imagined that creatures like three-toed giants had once lumbered across the land. And if anyone had somehow conjured up such a scene, they would never have imagined that all those animals could have vanished, hundreds of millions years ago. The thought of sudden, arbitrary disappearance from life was unnerving and forced the Victorians to rethink everything they knew about the world.
Now, in Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party, celebrated storyteller and historian Edward Dolnick leads us through a compelling true adventure as the paleontologists of the first half of the 19th century puzzled their way through the fossil record to create the story of dinosaurs we know today. The tale begins with Mary Anning, a poor, uneducated woman who had a sixth sense for finding fossils buried deep inside cliffs; and moves to a brilliant, eccentric geologist named William Buckland, a kind of Doctor Doolittle on a mission to eat his way through the entire animal kingdom; and then on to Richard Owen, the most respected and the most despised scientist of his generation.
Entertaining, erudite, and featuring an unconventional cast of characters, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party tells the story of how the accidental discovery of prehistoric creatures upended humanity’s understanding of the world and their place in it, and how a group of paleontologists worked to bring it back into focus again.
Edward Dolnick (10 november 1952) is the author of Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party, The Writing of the Gods, The Clockwork Universe, The Forger’s Spell, and the Edgar Award–winning The Rescue Artist, among other books. A former chief science writer at The Boston Globe, he has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. He lives with his wife near Washington, DC.