Author: Walter Alvarez
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Pro:
- Deeply sourced and lovingly presented
- Appetizing and well paced for non-geologists
- Plenty of period maps, photos and illustrations
- Well produced with full scholarly apparatus
- A little heavy on "as we saw" and "as we will see"
- Thorough treatment of the Apennines as a touchstone of geologic research
- Redresses Anglo-centric accounts of geology's history as a science
- Recounts a life well lived in research
Book Review
Walter Alvarez is not just a supremely lucky scientist, but also a first-rate geologist. His luck is well known. He was alert enough to spot the signs, by an Italian roadside, of the "crater of doom" impact widely thought to have ended the Cretaceous Period and with it the dinosaurs. He was forceful enough to push forward a wave of research and take on the doubters, leading a classic and timely (and widely overstated) paradigm shift away from "conservative uniformitarian thinking" in geology. One never sets out to accomplish such a thing.If you think of science in terms of American football (not so outlandish), Alvarez worked hard and when the ball happened to fall into his hands, he took it for a touchdown. In that superstar role he has gained glory, left bruises and done a little end-zone celebrating in his previous book T. Rex and the Crater of Doom. But at the time of his discovery he had spent years in Italy, and would spend decades more there, doing something else.
In the Mountains of Saint Francis is about that something else. It's about the rewards of playing on the team: being a first-rate geologist for more than 30 years in a field area of exceptional beauty, history and scientific fruitfulness. The mountains of the title are Alvarez's fanciful name for the central Apennines around the ancient land of Tuscany, where Francis earned his sainthood and where, as it happens, five centuries later the first true geologist studied the land and rocks.
The Apennines are the spine of Italy and, in many respects, the key to its civilization. Their rocks are clear enough for Nicholaus Steno to have derived the fundamental laws of stratigraphy in the 1660s. Yet they are also puzzling enough to have excited researchers ever since. Working geologists will take great pleasure following the developments in, and the people of, Italian geology in Alvarez's hands.
Mountains of Saint Francis is user-friendly enough for readers new to geology, if they are motivated by a strong curiosity and a love of nature. The author's teaching experience has seen to that. The Crater of Doom is for most people an abstract factoid; for geologists it has limited explanatory power. But by leveraging the success of his concept to publish this warm and humane book Walter Alvarez is helping to spark a new generation of Earth scientists, and that is a very good thing for the game.
