\nThe World Without Us<\/i> suggests we “picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow.”\n<\/p>\n
\nThe book is full of interesting facts and scenarios – how our houses will be worn down by rain and freezing weather and small animals, and how subway tunnels will flood, and the various possible (disastrous) ways that a petrochemical complex could fall apart.\n<\/p>\n
\nThere are also the things that will survive: rubber and plastic are effectively indestructible (until some microbe evolves that can eat them), old bronze coins are very durable, and Mount Rushmore is likely to be discernible millions of years from now.\n<\/p>\n
\nHowever the author often wanders quite far from this main theme. While he does talk about what the world would be without us, he also spends quite a lot of time talking about how we have already changed the world (hunting mammoths to extinction etc) and how we currently affect the environment (plastic floating around in oceans etc) and about various relatively untouched parts of the world. While these can be interesting topics, they make the book unfocused. I didn’t count the pages but I felt that more space was devoted to these excursions than to the promised topic. He isn’t quite delivering what the title and the cover have promised, but something else, which is a bit underhanded.\n<\/p>\n
\nAnd at the same time, I thought there was too little detail in the scenarios he describes. He paints the broad outlines but skips the fine detail. There was too little actual material, making me think this was a collection of essays stretched by a journalist to fill a whole book.\n<\/p>\n
\nThis probably also explains why the content felt disorganized at times: like a collection of anecdotes without any discernible direction. While I was reading the book, it was mostly very interesting, but without a clear structure, I find it hard to actually remember much of it afterwards.\n<\/p>\n
\nWeisman’s journalist background shines through in his writing, too: it is quite wordy and mannered. Humans don’t just use a lot of energy, we’re “energy-drunk”, cold winds don’t meet warm air but “slam into” it, and so on on every page.
\nThere are also his formulaic introductions of the various experts he meets. Really, it is of no interest to me whether the expert he quotes is “bespectacled under his wide-brimmed felt hat” or “a lanky man with wavy dark hair”.\n<\/p>\n
\nOn the whole, this was a great idea, but somewhat suboptimally executed. The end result isn’t bad, in fact I’d recommend it, but just a bit disappointing.\n<\/p>\n
\nAmazon UK<\/a>, Amazon US<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The World Without Us suggests we “picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow.” The book is full of interesting facts and scenarios – how our houses will be worn down by rain and freezing weather and small animals, and how subway tunnels will flood, and the various possible (disastrous) ways that a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[247,77,154,246,78],"class_list":["post-792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-alan_weisman","tag-book_review","tag-environment","tag-nature","tag-non_fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=792"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1394,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792\/revisions\/1394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}